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THE 
WAR AND THE SOUL 



BY 

REV. R. J. CAMPBELL, M.A. 

Of St. Philip's Cathedral Church, 
Birmingham 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1916 






Copyright, 1916 
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 



4if 

AUG 10 1 



©CI.A437189 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PA GE 

I Religion and the War ....... i 

II Prayers for the Dead 12 

III War Suffering: Why Did God Re- 

frain From Stopping It? . . . . 18 

IV What Is There to Be Afraid Of? . . 23 
V War and Sacrifice 32 

VI Pessimism 41 

VII The Higher Command 51 

VIII About Pacifism 63 

IX If I Were God 74 

X The Churches and Universal Peace. 

A General Council 84 

XI The Illusion of Progress .... 96 

XII Religion After the War: Will Chris- 
tianity Survive? 106 

XIII Noel at the Front 123 

XIV Retrospect 139 

XV Our New Year Outlook 149 

XVI What Is Hell? . 160 

XVII Reunion 179 

XVIII Imagination and the Future . . . 189 

XIX Reorganisation After the War . . 200 

XX Will Our Civilisation Survive? . .212 

XXI Democracy and Autocracy Con- 
trasted: Is the Former Less Effi- 
cient? . . 225 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXII The Supernatural Order .... 235 

XXIII King of England 244 

XXIV German Comfort: Two Great Men 

Contrasted 254 

XXV The Uncaused Cause: the Mystery 

of God and Man 264 

XXVI Not Knowing 272 

XXVII Our Mutual Ignorance .... 281 

XXVIII The Ages of Faith and the Ages of 

Reason; New-Old and Old-New . 290 



INTRODUCTION 

In the autumn of last year the writer of the ac- 
companying little dissertations on great themes was 
approached by the management of a Sunday paper 
in London with the request that he should con- 
tribute a weekly article to the columns of that peri- 
odical. He hesitated for some time before ac- 
cepting the proposal, as he thought it hardly likely 
that the words of a preacher would have much 
value for such a constituency, and frankly said so. 
In reply the proprietors of the paper courteously 
assured him that he need have no misgivings about 
the matter, that they were quite well aware of the 
fact that the subjects in which he was most at home 
were not those usually discussed in popular journals, 
but that they believed there was a public which 
wanted them, and that to this end they were pre- 
pared to offer him what was practically a pulpit. 

The connection thus begun has continued har- 
moniously up to the present, and is likely to do so 
for some time longer. Week by week these articles 
have appeared, are still appearing regularly, and 
are read by the vast circle to which this Sunday 
publication goes. Some of them have appeared in 
the New York American and other newspapers 



viii INTRODUCTION 

in the United States. The experiment of includ- 
ing articles on definitely religious and spiritual sub- 
jects in secular journals is not so new in America as 
it is in England. Readers of American Sunday 
papers have long been accustomed to them. 

Those that have been already published on both 
sides of the Atlantic, together with some that have 
not, have now been gathered up in volume form and 
are here presented to the reading public. There may 
be some who have already read most of them who 
may be glad to possess them as a book, and perhaps 
others who have not read them may prefer to do so 
in a book rather than the columns of a newspaper. 
This at least is the suggestion of many under whose 
notice they have come. The author's thanks are 
due to the proprietors of the publications in which 
they have appeared for permission to re-issue them 
in this more permanent form. 

For the benefit of reviewers it should be stated 
that the following chapters are not in any sense a 
unity. They are printed almost exactly as they 
originally stood, and therefore necessarily retain the 
fragmentary and topical character of the weekly 
article. The Great European War dominates them 
all. They are not addressed to the intellectuals, but 
to simple people, many of whom have lost their 
dearest and best in the bloody strife that is going on. 
America is watching all this suffering with openly 
expressed sympathy and giving much practical sue- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

cour to the wounded and despoiled; therefore it is 
not unfitting that Americans should read words 
which were penned in the first instance for people 
who are passing through the furnace of pain and 
anguish into which Europe has been plunged by the 
wickedness of rulers. That these short essays deal 
with some of the great problems of life and death, 
of grief, and strain, and misery in view of the war 
and all it means to the world, is only to be expected. 
The writer undertook the work originally with this 
purpose in mind. Some of the pages were penned 
at the seat of war itself and within sound of the 
guns. They represent a serious attempt to give 
help and encouragement, and a certain measure of 
enlightenment, to persons who at present feel their 
need of these in the abnormal conditions which pre- 
vail. They are therefore sent out on their further 
mission in the hope that an honest intent may se- 
cure for them some amount of welcome and good 
will, and that critics will be merciful to their many 
faults. 



THE WAR AND THE SOUL 



THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

CHAPTER I 

RELIGION AND THE WAR 

A question which is agitating many minds at the 
present time is that of the possibility of any longer 
holding to belief in divine direction of human af- 
fairs in face of the appalling havoc wrought by the 
war. This is not what is ordinarily termed a re- 
ligious question; it is being asked by thousands who 
are neither religious nor irreligious in the conven- 
tional sense. The majority of one's fellow-country- 
men, if one understands them rightly, consists of 
persons who have a sort of respect for religion with- 
out troubling much about it; it is not until some 
special crisis occurs, some drastic interference with 
their ordinary modes of living, that they begin to 
inquire into the nature of their spiritual resources 
and what they are supposed to believe concerning 
them. 

And this inquiry is going on now very seriously; 
or, rather, there is a widespread feeling of the utter 
insufficiency of religion, as commonly understood, 
to interpret for us the terrible situation in which 
we find ourselves. People are said to have lost 



2 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

faith, if they ever had it; Christianity is declared to 
have collapsed; and we are told that the worst of 
all ironies just now is to try to impress the multitude 
of bereaved with any confidence in benevolent super- 
human agency. 

One is constantly meeting with intelligent, culti- 
vated people who take this attitude, not to speak 
of the unthinking many who do the same. " Where 
was God when my only boy was bayoneted in the 
face and left to bleed to death in agony? " cries one 
broken-hearted mother. " If prayer were any use, 
would the child I bore with so much anguish, and 
for whom I have never ceased to besiege heaven day 
or night, be torn to pieces by German shells, and 
shriek for death to end his torments?" wails an- 
other. 

And if it were men only, and death only! But 
women, little children, the frailest, most sensitive, 
most refined have had to endure every extremity of 
horror and abasement, and are doing so still. 

When I was last in France some of our soldiers 
informed me of finding in certain bloody, filthy 
Prussian trenches they had taken no less than nine- 
teen French and Belgian women and girls, stark 
naked, tied to posts, for their swinish captors to 
abuse as they pleased. Most of them were in a 
dying condition, some had lost their reason. Picture 
that, Englishmen, and ask what we should be feeling 
in this country should our wives and daughters ever 



RELIGION AND THE WAR 3 

be subjected to such an infamy, as they unquestion- 
ably would if the Huns succeeded in effecting a 
landing on our shores. Nearly a million helpless 
Armenians butchered amid every circumstance of 
torture, rape, and pillage ! And then to talk of God 
and Heaven! Are we fools? 

Wait a moment. I am not over-anxious to defend 
religion as such; let religion go, if go it must — 
though I know it never can go while man exists. 
What I want is to find out what we poor creatures 
have to rely on in the struggle of life if the funda- 
mental postulate of religion is a mistake and there is 
no higher consciousness than our own to know or 
care what becomes of us. 

I am assuming nothing; I am only asking. Can 
we dispense with a spiritual sanction for human 
activities? Is it even conceivable that we could? 
By no means; and, what is more, I hold, and would 
be prepared to prove, that there never has been an 
hour in the world's history when the spiritual sanc- 
tions of human life were more apparent than now, 
all its horrors notwithstanding — nay, even because 
of them. We are getting down to realities if we ever 
did, delusions and deceits are being shorn away, 
and we are finding ourselves in losing all else. Let 
us try to see the problem in its true proportions, and 
I think we shall succeed. 

Take the following propositions seriatim. 

In the first place, the scale of the problem is not 



4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

quite what it seems. We are apt to take for granted 
that if a million people suffer where only one suffered 
before the pain to be individually borne must be all 
the greater. But it is not. No person suffers a 
million times as much because a million others are 
suffering at the same time; we suffer one at once, 
and each bears his own share. No human conscious- 
ness can bear more than a certain amount of suffer- 
ing, bodily or mental, and my point is that the prob- 
lem of human anguish is not one whit greater because 
a million or a hundred million lives are affected than 
because one is. All the woe of all the battlefields in 
Europe to-day might be concentrated in time of 
peace into the bosom of one old woman dying of 
cancer in hospital. All the grief of all the homes 
bereaved could be summed up in the tears shed by 
any open grave where faithful love mourns the loss 
of its dearest and best; the sorrow is not one bit 
bigger in the one case than in the other. 

Let me insist upon the point, for it is worth noting. 
I say that the problem of what is wrong with the 
world is not greater by one iota because of the war 
than it was before the war began; our imagination 
is more deeply stirred, and that is all. The question 
is not why things should be wrong on such a grand 
scale, but why they should ever be wrong at all, 
why any single pang should ever have to be endured 
by a human heart, why loss and terror, and the de- 



RELIGION AND THE WAR 5 

struction of things dear and beautiful should ever 
have to enter into our experience. 

And I think we can see behind appearances here. 
Why should we assume that it is God's business, 
so to speak, to see that we are made happy in this 
world? That is the crux of the whole matter. 
Without pausing to think it out, most people take 
the ground that the goodness of God ought to imply 
the felicity of His creation here and now; their great 
puzzle is to account for a divine benevolence which 
acts otherwise. But, I repeat, we have no warrant 
for this; it does not in the least follow that because 
God is good — granting for the moment that good- 
ness, as we understand it, is an attribute of the divine 
nature — therefore there must be no pain or imper- 
fection anywhere in the universe; in fact, there are 
not a few indications which point quite another way. 

The object of life on this planet, so far as human 
beings are concerned, and perhaps all other crea- 
tures, too, is not happiness, but the development of 
latent faculty, the bringing out of the potentialities 
of existence as a whole. I grant that this is a pro- 
digious assertion and one open to challenge, but I 
contend that no reasonable being can well doubt 
it if he have regard to history and experience. It 
is almost a truism to say that the highest kind of life, 
if we could realise it, must include all that we mean 
by happiness, but then we have not yet achieved the 



6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

highest kind of life, or anything like it, and the very 
conditions of our earthly lot forbid that we should. 

Let us get this one thing well into our minds, and 
it will clear the ground for a good deal else. I say 
that we are not put here primarily to be happy; there 
is a great deal of happiness in the world, but happi- 
ness at this stage of our evolution is not, and should 
not be, the first aim either of God or man in relation 
to humanity in the mass or the individual in particu- 
lar. Perfect happiness, fulness of joy, will come 
later when we have got up to it, as it were, when we 
have reached the ultimate goal of all our strivings 
and attained to complete realisation of what we 
essentially are and what life itself intrinsically is. 

There are some things impossible even to omnipo- 
tence. " Father, can God do everything? " asked a 
small boy. " Yes," was the reply. " Well, then, 
can He make a stone bigger than He can lift? " was 
the next question put by the youngster. Here was 
a poser. Obviously omnipotence was not equal to 
such a task, for success in either direction would mean 
its own limitation in the other. And the same is true 
of higher issues. Not even omnipotence could de- 
clare the highest reach of nobleness without pain. 
The worthiest things, the sweetest and sublimest, in 
human character and achievement, require pain for 
their manifestation, and without pain could not be 
revealed at all. The things we most reverence in 
one another or in the mightly dead are things that 



RELIGION AND THE WAR 7 

have been born of sacrifice and struggle. Where 
were courage without danger, tenderness without 
hardship couching at the door, sympathy without 
suffering, glory and honour without peril and strife ? 
Look deep enough and you will see that there is not 
a single quality in the whole range of human excel- 
lence that is not somewhere, somehow, associated 
with the cross. I would rather see England great 
than England safe; I would rather our hearts' best 
beloved died to a man on the battlefields of Europe 
than live ignoble in the soul-destroying delights of 
sense indulgence; I would rather be the sorrowing 
mother of brave Nurse Edith Cavell, whom the Ger- 
mans have murdered, than know my child a mere toy, 
a butterfly intent only on sipping the sweets of life, 
and with neither eye nor ear for its more austere 
ideals and demands. 

Moreover, I do not for one moment believe that 
the world is less Christian than it was before the 
war, or less intent on spiritual things. The exact 
contrary is the case as far as my experience goes. I 
have more than once stated that if any man wants 
to be cured of religious pessimism, or any other kind 
of pessimism, he had better go to the front. If I 
had been an unbeliever before I went there I should 
speedily have been cured. There one sees things 
every day, almost every hour, to make one marvel 
at the greatness of the human soul. You will see 
hell wide open, it is true, but you will see heaven like- 



8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

wise. Such heroism, patience, self-devotion, cheer- 
fulness under affliction, readiness to fling life away to 
save a comrade or a position — surely these mean 
more, and are worth more, than the immediate object 
of their exercise. 

Was the commercialised Europe of a year and 
a half ago really a better Europe than the Europe of 
slaughter and misery in which we are living to-day? 
That it certainly was not. Sordid, covetous, materi- 
alistic it had become; now all its outward good is 
going up in smoke and flame, and we are thrown 
back, whether we will or no, on the vast eternities. 
Either life has nothing in it or it must be lived to 
higher ends than can ever be fully satisfied in this 
world. If we are wise we shall not hesitate in our 
choice of alternatives. This is no time for self-pity 
or for abstract discussions of the ways of God. The 
clarion call to high action has gone forth, and woe to 
the soul that disregards it; our punishment will be 
simply to drop out of the ranks of the advancing 
host of those who go to meet the splendours of God 
upon the cliff-tops of the morning. 

It is trivial to ask whether heaven could or could 
not have prevented this war, just as it is beside the 
mark to question whether this or that human being 
was to blame for it. Here it is, and we have got to 
do the best we can in the new moral situation it 
creates. God is not responsible for any man's wick- 
edness; and wickedness is wickedness, whatever 



RELIGION AND THE WAR 9 

comes of it. But when wickedness produces disaster 
on a grand scale or a small one we are entitled to 
say that that disaster could not have come about 
unless divine wisdom chose to make use of it for 
other and larger ends than any petty human will can 
either thwart or compass. 

Christianity has not failed, whatever we may say 
of Christians. The Christian imperative is still here 
in all its pristine force ; it is we who are found want- 
ing. If the Church of Christ is not rising to the 
full measure of her opportunities that is our own 
fault, not the fault of the divine Founder. The 
Pope has lost the greatest chance that any occupant 
of the Vatican has had since the Reformation; his 
silence so far in presence of such a flagrant moral 
wrong as the violation of Belgium, and now the 
wholesale destruction of the Armenian people by 
Germany's dastardly ally, is one of the most regret- 
table facts in all this period of upheaval and misery. 
But Roman priests on the battlefield have more than 
made up for the silence of their official head, and no 
other Church has been a whit behind them. When 
the Chief Rabbi of Lyons died holding the crucifix 
before the glazing eyes of a Belgian Catholic who 
took him for a priest, he exhibited more of the spirit 
of Christ, the spirit that will yet lift mankind out of 
this pit of horror into the light of eternal love, than 
any amount of ecclesiastical protestations would or 
could. The Church is not paralysed by the war, nor 



io THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

is her faith shaken. She needs a more vigorous 
lead, that is all. 



There is only one point more that ought to be 
mentioned. Protestantism in general has had little 
comfort to give to mourners, for it has been so sadly 
silent regarding the fate of our dead. Once the 
grave has closed over their dust we have been sup- 
posed to be able to do no more for them and to be 
ruthlessly cut off from all connection with them, 
direct or indirect. May it not be that this war will 
bring us back in a more definite and helpful fashion 
to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints? Our 
dead are not only not dead, but more alive than we. 
To some extent they must need us still; the shock of 
passing out of the physical body cannot have changed 
them very much; they want us, think of us, long to 
know that they are followed by our loving thoughts 
and prayers. If they were helped in this way while 
in the body they can be helped even more when out 
of it. Perhaps they need such help all the more 
because of the momentous transition to a new sphere 
and new adjustments. Thought travels swiftly, and 
helps or hinders according to the intensity we put 
into it even in the flesh ; how much more potent must 
it be when the flesh has been discarded! Hopeless 
grief on our part can only distress and hamper those 
who have gone, and they probably know of it quite 
well; but earnest, faithful, persevering, loving prayer 



RELIGION AND THE WAR n 

can reach to comfort them and cheer them on in their 
new venture of soul. 

Let all who have loved and lost think of this and 
set to work to bridge the gulf of death accordingly, 
and it will bring healing to their own wounded hearts. 
Nay, more, I think they will find that ere long some 
sure conviction will come to them from the mysteri- 
ous beyond that what they are doing is known and 
responded to by those on whose behalf it is done, 
and that they in their turn are sending back waves 
of heaven's tender grace and power to bless and 
strengthen their bereaved on earth. 



CHAPTER II 

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 

A letter just received refers to the statement with 
which the previous chapter concluded, about prayers 
for the dead. The writer wishes I would say more 
about this. He says that in his heart he has really 
believed in it all his life, but has always been taught 
that it was both useless and wrong. Once a person 
is dead, it is said, his fate is fixed and you can no 
more alter it by praying than you can alter the sea- 
sons or the tides. Even to wish to do so is impious 
and a questioning of the decrees of God. All the 
same, this writer adds, he has always longed to do it 
and never more so than to-day, when the world-war 
is making such havoc among human relationships. 
Will I give him some justification, some real author- 
ity, for believing in the efficacy of prayer for the de- 
parted? he requests. 

I wish the writer of this letter could have seen 
what I saw yesterday. It will be long past the date 
before these words are printed, but yesterday was 
what the French call " The Day of the Dead." 
Near where I am staying is a fairly large church, 
and in and out of this, all day long, the stream of 
worshippers has been pouring without intermission. 

12 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 13 

They are still doing it to-day, though in a somewhat 
less degree, and they will keep on doing it while the 
war lasts. Yesterday was All Souls' Day, to give it 
its ecclesiastical designation in England, as elsewhere 
throughout Christendom. Here, especially in view 
of the war, it seems to mean something very much 
more real and comforting than it does to most of us 
at home. 

What a yawning gulf ordinary Protestantism 
makes between the living and the dead, to be sure ! — 
or, rather, between those still in the flesh and those 
who have done with it. Not so the devout Catholic, 
simple-minded, earnest and sincere. To him, to her, 
the soul who has passed through the portals of death 
has not passed beyond the reach of loving care and 
tender sympathy. The loved one is not less, but 
more responsive to the loyal, helpful solicitude of 
those left behind, and perhaps, for a time, may need 
it more. 

I sat in the church for a good while and watched 
those people come and go. It was an experience 
never to be forgotten. All were in mourning; all 
had lost some one near and dear either on the battle- 
field or in the ordinary course of nature. I judged, 
and I think I was not mistaken, that the war was 
uppermost in their minds, that the grim reaper had 
gained most of his harvest of late from the battle- 
field so far as this company was concerned. 

There were no young men present; they were all 



i 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

at the front. There were plenty of old men, old 
soldiers many of them looked, stumping bravely 
along with military stride and bearing; old women 
leaning on sticks; grey-haired matrons with weep- 
ing eyes; young widows carrying their babies or lead- 
ing their little children by the hand; boys in their 
teens, some of them already in soldier's garb or what 
approximated thereto; girls, troops of them, with 
subdued and reverent mien. 

Most were kneeling before the dimly lighted altar. 
Some of them, the veterans especially, stood erect, 
their lips moving in devoted entreaty to the holy 
Presence they believed to be there before their eyes. 
For it should not be forgotten that to these people, 
in the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, is vouch- 
safed a visual revelation of the actual presence of 
the Lord Christ Himself. Who shall say they are 
wrong? Since the war began, I have realised in 
French churches as I never did before, the devotional 
value, the practical helpfulness, of the reservation of 
the sacrament of the altar. It makes all the differ- 
ence between a dead building and a place that is a 
sanctuary indeed, wherein worshippers feel that they 
are in immediate contact with the supernatural and 
divine. 

What a picture it was! One wished an artist 
could have been present to seize and perpetuate it. 
It grew dark; there was a storm raging outside and 
had been all day, but it seemed to have made no dif- 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 15 

ference to the numbers present. There was one 
candle, and one candle only, to light the gloom, and 
that was placed on the floor at the foot of the altar 
steps. The lamps glimmering in the chancel above 
it supplied the only additional illumination there 
was. Here and there one caught a quick breath, a 
murmur, a sob, a sigh as the feelings of the bereaved 
became wrought to a pitch of intensity. There was 
no other sound but that of feet passing softly to 
and fro as individuals entered or left the church. 
Now and then a faint gleam would fall upon a rapt, 
upturned face — for the worshippers were kneeling 
anywhere, not in serried ranks, but in the aisles, 
near the doors, on the ground close up to the altar 
itself — anywhere — all in black, all silent, all pray- 
ing with one set purpose, one intention of love and 
faith. It was impossible to be there without being 
moved by it. There was a strange, unearthly power 
in the very atmosphere. 

Would any one tell me that the exercise upon which 
these people were engaged was all in vain, that 
heaven neither desired nor heeded it, and that the 
trust and affection that prompted it were utterly de- 
luded as to the object they sought to achieve? Be it 
remembered, this, after all, is the faith of the major- 
ity of Christendom, the faith that the communion of 
saints still continues after the shock of death. It has 
antiquity on its side, and, though greatly abused in 
pre-Reformation days, satisfies such a natural in- 



1 6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

stinct, and is such a solace to the bereaved, that it is a 
pity Protestants everywhere should not be encour- 
aged to return to it forthwith. 

If, as seems likely enough, the disembodied soul 
feels somewhat bewildered at first in its new environ- 
ment, as we are told many do; if it has entered that 
new sphere through the din and excitement of battle 
or fresh from the pain and weakness and delirium of 
days and weeks in hospital; if it longs for the old 
faces and the old fellowships of the earthly home, and 
feels, as we may be sure it cannot but feel, the impact 
of the grief and sorrow of those who mourn its loss 
— surely the best thing one could do on this side, 
both for that soul and for ourselves, would be to 
send through nothing but earnest prayers that it may 
rest in peace. I say " it," but I ought to say " he " 
or " she," as the case may be. Our dead are not 
gone far; they have only begun on the other side 
where they left off here. If they needed us before 
they need us now, and we need them. The body as 
the medium of communication is struck away, but 
that is all. Thought, feeling, memory, goodwill are 
all what they were before — perhaps even stronger, 
for the hindrance of the corruptible flesh is gone and 
the spiritual can go straighter to its mark. If we 
can help one another by prayer while we are still 
on the physical plane, there is no reason, either in 
logic or the nature of things, why we should not con- 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 17 

tinue to do so even more effectually when some of 
us have done with the body of our humiliation and 
passed out of sight. 

Death is only a bend in the road of life. 



CHAPTER III 

WAR SUFFERING. WHY DID GOD REFRAIN 
FROM STOPPING IT? 

Another correspondent takes exception to a state- 
ment in the opening chapter: u When wickedness 
produces disaster . . . that disaster could not have 
come about unless divine wisdom chose to make use 
of it for other ends," etc. 

He says he can understand the death of a heroine 
like Miss Cavell, or one of our brave soldiers, having 
lessons to teach to those around them and to us at 
home; but if they had to go through the infamous 
torture and degradation to which French and Belgian 
women were subjected, as stated above, it would re- 
volt us to have to believe that God permitted it for 
some purpose of His own. 

The statement, to which this gentleman says he 
cannot subscribe, ought not to be considered apart 
from its context. I am writing far away from my 
home and my library, and cannot quite recall the pre- 
cise words used in the paragraph to which reference 
is made, but I know what I think about the matter 
and will try to say it. 

We are not entitled to draw a line in this way be- 
tween one kind of suffering and another, and affirm 

18 



WAR SUFFERING 19 

that one is divinely permitted for a good reason and 
the other not. Deity cannot be responsible in the 
former case and helpless in the latter. Relatively 
speaking, all suffering, bodily or mental, is evil — 
that is, it would have no place in a perfect existence. 
It may have a purpose to serve — indeed, we may be 
sure it has — in the making of that perfect existence, 
but no one could say existence is perfect while suffer- 
ing remains. But there is no escape from the prop- 
osition that what God permits He causes. He is an 
efficient cause, as the logicians say, of any event or 
series of events if He does no more than let them take 
place even if other wills set them going. 

The Kaiser is an efficient cause of the present war, 
allowing for the moment that he did not actually start 
it. I am afraid he did. I am afraid he meant to do 
it; but even if he did not, even if other people planned 
it more directly and remorselessly, he is responsible 
for it if only from the fact that one word from him 
could have prevented it and that word was not 
spoken. 

We might say the whole conflagration was imme- 
diately caused by a mad-headed student firing a shot 
at the Austrian heir-apparent. That shot was like 
a spark to gunpowder and set the world in a blaze. 
But does this exonerate the Kaiser? By no means. 
He is infinitely more responsible for the oceans of 
blood that have since been spilled than was the half- 
crazy boy who fired that shot. 



20 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Moreover, so far as the British empire's part in it 
is concerned, Sir Edward Grey is more responsible 
than the Serbian fanatic whose deed set the whole 
train of disasters in motion; and every one of us 
would say as much. Sir Edward Grey could have 
kept us out of it, but he chose not to do so, and the 
vast majority of his fellow-countrymen think he chose 
rightly. Sir Edward Grey was an efficient cause of 
the terrible fact that we are at war to-day, that tens 
of thousands of our sons and brothers have been slain 
and hundreds of thousands maimed for life, that mul- 
titudes of homes have been plunged in mourning, 
that Edith Cavell was foully murdered, and I know 
not what else. But does this mean that our Foreign 
Minister deliberately chose that these evils should 
come about? Not at all; no one would say so. He 
only accepted these consequences rather than submit 
us to other and worse consequences such as national 
dishonour. 

Now is not the point clear? Heaven could pre- 
vent anything it chose to prevent taking place on 
earth. If it does not do so it is because it does not 
wish to do so, because the alternative would bring 
greater evil in its train. 

John Henry Newman says, in his Apologia Pro 
Vita Sua, that it is preferable for a soul to undergo 
any torment rather than commit so much as one 
venial sin. One shrinks from endorsing this utter- 
ance to the full, but perhaps it is the truth. All the 



WAR SUFFERING 21 

evil passion that is working such misery in the world 
to-day was in the world before; now it has broken 
loose and is showing its true character, destroying 
itself by glutting itself as evil always does. God 
could have stopped any suffering resulting from this 
cause. But He refrained from so doing, and I think 
we can see why. Innocent or guilty, we suffer to- 
gether, and humanity is purged in the fires of afflic- 
tion. The world would be in a worse state if evil- 
doing were not followed by pain than it is even at the 
present dark hour; and the innocent victims of bru- 
tality and wrong help to demonstrate that more than 
those justly punished, if ever any are justly punished. 
The sinless Christ upon His Cross has done more to 
convict the world of sin than all the criminals that 
were ever executed since human society began. 

A few weeks ago a lady of strongly pacifist opin- 
ions was arguing with me against our participation 
in the war, and I almost lost patience with her — to 
speak quite truthfully, I did lose it. At length I told 
her of some of the horrible things our soldiers had 
related to me as having seen done to women in Bel- 
gium. " If those hounds of hell ever come here," 
I added, " they will do the same things to you and 
yours. How will your pacifist sentiments stand 
that? And, make no mistake about it, what stands 
between you and that outrage now is our Army and 
our Fleet. Let these give way before the foe, and 
you may expect the very uttermost in bodily ill-treat- 



22 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ment, degradation, and bloody massacre. " She 
turned pale for a moment and looked greatly dis- 
tressed. The vision appalled her. But she is a 
good woman and absolutely sincere. Recovering 
herself, she answered with quiet dignity: "Well, 
if the worst came to the worst, I think I should not 
lose my trust in God. The shame would not be 
mine; the shame would be theirs who subjected me 
to such a fate ; and they could only maltreat my body, 
after all; no stain would rest upon my soul." 

In those few brave and honest words I think is 
summed up the best answer that could be given to 
the question raised above. 

While I am writing I should like to mention some- 
thing that bereaved families at home may be glad to 
know. On All Souls' Day, in the military district in 
France where I am at present working, the hospital 
staffs and the officers clubbed together to purchase 
flowers and decorated therewith the grave of every 
British soldier. Requiescant in pace. 



CHAPTER IV 

WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 

A friend, looking through the preceding chapter 
before it was printed, remarked, " It is a pity you had 
not space to discuss what we really have to fear in 
life, and why." I quite agree that this is a subject 
which arises inevitably out of the one already con- 
sidered — namely, the relation of religion to the 
world war. What are we afraid of; what ought we 
be afraid of, if at all? 

We are afraid of suffering, losing, and, in varying 
degrees, of harm coming to persons and interests we 
love. This is all that is the matter in England to- 
day, barring our own ignorance and wrong-headed- 
ness. We are afraid of pain in body or mind, of 
bereavement in soul or substance, of evil overtaking 
our country's cause or the few individuals we hold 
most near and dear. And such feeling is very 
natural, though, as I shall try to show, more or less 
illusory. We ought to get above it; we ought to be 
afraid of being afraid ; we ought to seek to rise to the 
moral height whereon the only thing to be feared 
is to fail of being and doing our best. For, if we 
only knew it, this is all that is worth our solicitude ; 
it includes every other good that could be thought or 

23 



24 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

named. This is what life is for, to get the best out 
of us; it has no other meaning. And this best car- 
ries with it ultimately all the benefits we have ever 
needed or desired, and probably much more than we 
have even glimpsed as yet. Pain is joy in the mak- 
ing; nothing can be lost that ever was ours; no evil 
can touch, much less injure, the truly essential things 
in man or nation. This is a great deal to say, but 
it can be justified from the experience of those who 
have lived their lives in terms of it in the past and are 
endeavouring to do so in the present. If ever we 
were on sure ground in the region of the unprovable 
— and what on earth is provable in the strict sense, 
good or bad? — it is here. 

The primary cause of suffering is the vulnerability 
of the flesh. If bodies could not be hurt we should 
not suffer, in this way at any rate, and perhaps not in 
any other either. And yet it is this very suscepti- 
bility, this sensitiveness to physical pain, that has 
brought the race to where it is ; it is the root of every- 
thing fine and gracious, noble and admirable, in our 
complex and imperfect nature. It is the heart of all 
the social virtues, imagination, feeling, poetry, art, 
and government; without it humanity as we know 
it to-day, in all that distinguishes it from the lower 
creation, could not have come to be. Physically we 
are less protected by nature than any other organism, 
more exposed at all points to the assaults of danger 
and disease, are more liable to perish of hunger and 



WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 25 

cold. We have had to bestir ourselves in order to 
live at all; we cannot comfortably take existence for 
granted; and it is to this, more than anything else, 
that we owe the development of faculty which has 
raised us to where we are in the scale of being; the 
incessant stimulus of physical pain, and the necessity 
of scheming to avoid it, have given us our elaborate 
nervous organisation and the intelligence to make 
use of it. And it has brought out much more, 
though not yet so successfully; it has brought out our 
moral consciousness and all the spiritual longings 
that accompany it and which earth can never fully 
satisfy. On the other hand, it makes us feel the pull 
of the physical and to tend to overvalue it. Europe 
is fighting to-day because we rate so highly the im- 
portance of physical things; we individually and col- 
lectively want to get and keep as much as possible of 
material wealth in order to secure physical comfort. 
That is the meaning of Germany's bid for world 
power, mad as it is. What power could anybody 
have over anybody else but for the physical? What 
use would there be for governments but for the phys- 
ical? What would lust of territory and commercial 
predominance amount to but for the physical? 
Suppose that at a stroke all necessity for feeding and 
clothing people could be made to disappear from the 
earth; suppose no quivering flesh could be torn by 
shot and shell or injured in any way by material 
means, Kaiserism and everything it stands for would 



26 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

be swept from the globe ; nobody would have a word 
to say to it or pay the slightest heed to it. But, as 
I have already shown, something else might disap- 
pear too, and that would be the main dynamic of our 
moral energies. Not entirely, I admit, for what is 
gained is gained; man is man, and would not be man 
without idealism; and all our idealism, I contend, has 
been born of our pains and struggles. Take the 
urgency for these away, while allowing conditions 
otherwise to remain much as they are, and, judging 
from all the indications of the past, our tendency 
would be to let go and sink down to sordid and unin- 
spiring levels. 

"Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!" 

But — here is the main point I wish to impress 
upon my readers — nothing that touches the physical 
only touches the real man or anything that is his. If 
we could get this well into our minds it would set us 
free from most of our fears and dreads, not to speak 
of hopeless sorrow and blind despair. I do not say 
it would deliver us utterly from suffering, either bod- 
ily or mental ; that is not to be expected while we are 
dwellers in the flesh; but I do say that it would take 
us right out of the paralysing dominion of terror — 
and only think what that would mean. Those were 



WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 27 

wise words of old, " Our light affliction, which is but 
for a moment, worketh for us more and more exceed- 
ingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look not 
at the things which are seen, but at the things which 
are not seen: for the things which are seen are tem- 
poral; but the things which are not seen are eternal." 
And finer still was the utterance of one who knew 
more about life and death than any who has ever 
yet worn human form : " Be not afraid of them that 
kill the body, and after have no more that they can 
do." I admit the difficulty of realising this at all 
times and consistently acting up to it; I have often 
thought that if I had lived in mediaeval times I should 
probably have confessed anything on the rack that 
my tormentors chose to put into my mouth ; and it is 
more than probable that if I saw my own child to-day 
in the foul hands of German Uhlans, and I powerless 
to save her from degradation, torture, and murder, 
I should be near to madness. We all know that such 
things as these have happened and are happening 
still. But, I reiterate it, we ought to know at the 
same time that nothing has been injured save the 
perishable outer shell of the victims we pity and 
would shed our blood to rescue from shame and 
wrong; no bestial hands have ever yet been laid upon 
the soul or ever will be. Death destroys nothing 
that belongs to us; he only withdraws it from our 
sight for a time. Behind the curtain of the visible 
and tangible all we have ever loved that was worthy 



28 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

of our love is waiting for us to claim it on a surer 
plane of possession; no one can be robbed of what 
is his in the spirit; it is his for ever. 

"The stars come nightly to the sky; 
The tidal wave comes to the sea; 
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, 
Can keep my own away from me." 

I am not a spiritualist, nor have I ever seen a su- 
pernatural appearance in my life; but I am absolutely 
convinced, from testimony which I could not doubt, 
that communication between the hither and the 
yonder, between beings still in the flesh and the so- 
called dead, is more frequently made than most peo- 
ple suppose; and such communication is going on rap- 
idly just now owing to the great number that in the 
prime of their manhood are passing to the other side 
through the shock of battle. It may not be wise or 
healthy-minded to dwell much upon these super- 
normal occurrences, but no one could deny them who 
knows the evidence. And in any case what other 
evidence do we want than the evidence of our spir- 
itual nature itself? The great difference in out- 
look between the oriental and ourselves is that the 
former assumes the soul as the foundation of all ex- 
perience and is not at all sure of the reality of the 
material world, whereas we begin by assuming the 
reality of the material world and go on to speculate 
as to whether there is a soul to survive it. Surely 
the former assumption has as much to justify it as 
the latter. 



WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 29 

What, then, is there to be afraid of in the turmoil 
and confusion through which the world is passing 
just now? Nothing whatever except to come down 
from what we individually know, whether any one 
tells us about it or not, to be our proper altitude of 
feeling and aim, and to play the coward or the traitor 
to our trust. And are we not in some danger of do- 
ing this? At the beginning of the war we were full 
of admiration for the spirit of the British people at 
home and abroad, proud of the loyalty and devotion 
of our fellow-subjects in every quarter of the world, 
full of self-congratulation at the unity of purpose 
manifest in all ranks and classes in face of the com- 
mon enemy. We loudly announced our conviction 
that the doom of Prussian militarism was sealed, that 
the war it had so criminally provoked would bring 
about its speedy destruction and disillusion the Ger- 
man people who have dwelt so long under its shadow, 
that the Berlin bureaucracy had clumsily blundered in 
every particular from its bullying diplomacy and 
cynical disregard of solemn pledges to its doctrine of 
frightfulness as demonstrated in martyred Belgium. 
There could only be one end to all this, we declared, 
and that would be to dictate the terms of peace in 
Berlin; we should have no half measures, no incon- 
clusive peace; we were fighting the enemy of the hu- 
man race, and all the moral forces of mankind were 
on our side. How does the situation look now? If 
there be unity of purpose anywhere it is not with us. 



3 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Strikes, incompetence, and party factions have 
brought the nation to the very verge of ruin, and if 
they do not cease forthwith will precipitate us into it. 
There is only one mind and will in Germany, and that 
is the mind and will to destroy us; all its energies 
are concentrated upon that one end, and there is not 
the slightest sign of slackening or deviation of aim 
in regard thereto. What have we to counter it with ? 
Only one thing, and if that fails all is lost — I mean 
the spirit of our people. It is strange how the spirit 
of a people can rise and fall from age to age. Com- 
pare the poor-spirited Greece of to-day with the 
Greece of Thermopylae and Salamis, of Leonidas and 
Pericles. We were a small and feeble folk in the 
spacious days of great Elizabeth compared with our 
numbers and resources to-day; but that tiny state 
broke the power of imperial Spain, which occupied 
then the same position relatively to the rest of the 
world that Germany occupies now. It was done 
by a great national spirit and nothing else, a spirit 
that could create and inspire fleets and armies, and 
without which fleets and armies are of little worth. 
Never was a more glorious band of men than the 
mighty captains who stood around the throne of Eng- 
land in that supreme hour of our national destiny. 
To-day an even greater crisis is upon us : is our na- 
tional spirit equal to it? — our daring, self-con- 
fidence, willingness to dedicate all we have and are 
to the salvation of our name and race? If so, the 



WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 31 

future of mankind is safe; if not, then the morrow- 
is with tyranny, brutality, and lies, and liberty is 
trampled into dust. The grief-stricken father who, 
at the Zeppelin raid inquest the other day, dramatic- 
ally summoned the Kaiser to meet him at the bar of 
God to answer for the crime of wholesale murder, 
thereby proclaimed what most people really believe 
in, his confidence in the moral order of the universe. 
In the long run this moral order is sure to be vindi- 
cated to the last detail, but how it will work out de- 
pends largely upon ourselves. The vast empires of 
Assyria and Babylon that oppressed little Judah are 
to-day no more than a name ; they have perished ut- 
terly from the earth, whereas the Jew still persists 
and plays his part among the nations. But, oh, the 
agony and blood it cost the Jew to survive and find 
his soul! One day Germany and her tremendous 
war machine, and her cruel trust in material force, 
will be no more than a name, an evil tradition of the 
past ; but where will England be ? When people pro- 
test that we could not lose in this contest because our 
cause is the cause of liberty and justice, I answer that 
that does not follow. History has another tale to 
tell — namely, that the better cause may for a time 
have to go under till its adherents are worthier to 
sustain it. Will that be our fate in this contest? I 
do not think so, but we must set our house in order 
and quickly. Every man to his post! All for the 
dear motherland whether we live or die ! 



CHAPTER V 

WAR AND SACRIFICE 

Recently I was the guest at mess of the staff of one 
of our field hospitals somewhere in France, and the 
conversation turned, as usual, upon the genesis of 
the war. We exhausted the list of Germany's misde- 
meanours in the fashion familiar to the world in gen- 
eral and Britons in particular, discussed Nietzsche 
and Treitschke ad lib., apportioned the blame be- 
tween the professors and the military, waxed warm 
upon the point as to whether the Teutonic swelled- 
head resulting from the victories of 1870 had not 
more to do with producing the bellicose professors 
than the professors had to do with producing the 
German spirit to-day, and so on and so forth. Fre- 
quent reference was made to the published diplo- 
matic correspondence as exposing Germany's criminal 
designs upon the possessions of her neighbours and 
her arrogant determination to trample upon the lib-, 
,erties of the world. Everybody knows the kind 
of thing that was being said; it is being said every- 
where except in Germany from hour to hour wher- 
ever men meet and talk. Presently, however, a 
young officer at the far end of the table spoke up. 
" All you are saying is probably true enough," he 

32 



WAR AND SACRIFICE 33 

remarked; " and we have heard every bit of it many 
times before. But the deepest reason of all for this 
war none of you have mentioned yet, and it simply 
is that human beings like fighting and are never con- 
tent for long without a fight." Instantly conversa- 
tion became controversy; I took no further part in it 
but sat and watched while the young Adonis who had 
flung the challenge — he was more like a Viking, by 
the way: fair-haired, blue-eyed, and of a tremendous 
height — developed his theme with animation and a 
considerable measure of success. He maintained 
that man cannot live without fighting, that there is 
nothing to be deprecated in the struggle for existence, 
that everything good in us is more or less associated 
with our fighting qualities, and that whenever life 
becomes colourless and commonplace, denuded of the 
heroic virtues, an explosion of some sort must take 
place to compel us to put forth our utmost again in 
the never-ceasing effort to grasp the unattainable and 
rise to superhuman planes of feeling and worth. 

One could not help agreeing mentally that there 
was much to be said for this view. That it does not 
take everything into account is obvious, but it sug- 
gests certain spiritual values which call for special 
attention in the period of strife and tumult through 
which we are living. I cannot think it really true to 
say that any ordinary civilised man would deliber- 
ately choose to precipitate a conflict like the present 
for the mere sake of enjoying a fight; it is too hor- 



34 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

rible for that; but once the fight is started he becomes 
conscious of demands upon his moral nature of 
which, perhaps, he was previously unaware. Even 
in time of peace life is none too easy for most people ; 
but in time of war all its customary securities and in- 
centives are swept away and we stand naked to the 
blast of calamity, hearing at the same time the call 
to high endeavour as we might never hear it in our 
whole history. And the curious thing about this 
call is that even the most unlikely people will re- 
spond to it and fling every earthly treasure behind 
them in so doing. Willingly, gladly, without com- 
pulsion of any kind save their own inner mandate, 
they will forsake home, comfort, the prospect of 
a successful career, and will imperil life itself for 
they hardly know what so long as the imperative 
comes in this form. No one need envy the coward 
and the skulker, the man who hears the call and re- 
fuses to obey because he is afraid of his skin being 
hurt or who is base enough to want to take advantage 
of the safety purchased for him by his brother's 
blood; but to me the truly impressive thing is to note 
how comparatively few of him there are. In Eu- 
rope to-day hundreds of thousands of young men are 
maimed for life ; in our own country we shall be meet- 
ing them by and by at every turn. Tens of thou- 
sands are slain, and these are of every rank and class. 
They have all been down into the very pit of hell and 
endured pains unspeakable. Why? Yesterday I 



WAR AND SACRIFICE 35 

met a man of ample means who has enlisted in the 
ranks and been serving for months amid scenes of 
privation and terror that beggar description. What 
does he do it for? Why does anybody do it? 
Three millions of the finest of our British youth have 
volunteered for the front, and those who love them 
dearly have let them go. Why should they if not 
because of a feeling we all have, which can scarcely 
justify itself to the reason — it is rather an instinct, 
a spiritual perception, than an articulate idea — that 
what we are fighting for is more of eternity than of 
time ? We feel that personal sacrifice to the utter- 
most is demanded of us and that we cannot hold back. 
We are making it for England, it is true; but is there 
not more than England at stake, more even than the 
liberties of mankind? I am sure of it, and I am sure 
we all know it, and that is why our sons and brothers 
go out so bravely to meet death and the rest of us 
steel our hearts to speed them to the ordeal. I have 
already said that but for the physical there would be 
no such fight possible, that what we are immediately 
fighting for is to win or hold so much of the earth's 
surface, that world power could have no significance 
but for the flesh and all that pertains to the flesh. 
And this is true ; but it is also true that the fight is not 
for the flesh alone, and that every man taking part 
in it is aware of the fact. No man would give his 
life for what was of the flesh alone ; and deep down 
in every one of us is the urge to give ourselves as 



36 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

fully as possible at the bidding of the ineffable some- 
what that we feel has the right to require the sacri- 
fice. That is what men are found willing to die for, 
though they are not always equally willing to live 
for it. It is a spiritual, not a material, thing. 
Sometimes it expresses itself as patriotism, sometimes 
as religious zeal, sometimes as the impulse to save 
the life of somebody else, as when a lifeboatman 
braves the storm to save a shipwrecked company, or 
a rescue party goes down into the choke-damp of a 
coal mine after an explosion to bring up the impris- 
oned survivors; but always and everywhere the im- 
pulse is the same ; it is the impulse to lay one's life on 
the altar of a dimly apprehended but unescapable di- 
vine reality behind and above the flux of sense, ma- 
jestic, eternal, insistent, compelling. And in noth- 
ing, perhaps, is the immediacy of this impulse so 
apparent as in war. 

Doubtless this is why great thinkers and seers have 
been disposed to glorify war despite its brutality and 
ghastliness. It is the inwardness of Ruskin's great 
saying, reluctantly made, that nations are saved by 
war and destroyed by peace ; and of that even greater 
passage in De Quincey concerning which a correspon- 
lent wrote to remind me the other day ■ — 

" Under circumstances that may exist, and have 
existed, war is a positive good; not relative merely, 
or negative, but positive. A great truth it was which 



WAR AND SACRIFICE 37 

Wordsworth uttered, whatever might be the expan- 
sion which he allowed to it, when he said that 

' God's most perfect instrument 
In working out a pure intent 
Is Man — arrayed for mutual slaughter: 
Yea, carnage is His daughter.' 

There is a mystery in approaching this aspect of the 
case which no man has read fully. War has a deeper 
and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in 
man than has yet been deciphered. To execute judg- 
ment of retribution upon outrages offered to human 
rights or to human dignity, to vindicate the sanctities 
of the altar and the sanctities of the hearth: these are 
functions of human greatness which war has many 
times assumed, and many times faithfully discharged. 
But, behind all these, there towers dimly a greater. 
The great phenomenon of war it is, this and this only, 
which keeps open in man a spiracle — an organ of 
respiration — for breathing a transcendent atmos- 
sphere, and dealing with an idea that else would per- 
ish : viz. the idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, 
doing and suffering, that finds its realisation in a bat- 
tle such as that of Waterloo — viz. a battle fought 
for interests of the human race, felt even where they 
are not understood; so that this tutelary Angel of 
Man, when he traverses such a dreadful field, when 
he reads the distorted features, counts the ghastly 
ruins, sums the hidden anguish, and the harvests 

' Of horror breathing from the silent ground,' 



38 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

nevertheless, speaking as God's messenger, * blesses 
it and calls it very good.' " 

This is language that I could not wholly endorse ; I 
am not prepared to admire war in this indiscriminate 
fashion and account it of God. It is only of God 
while men's hearts are hard. But facts are facts, 
and it is the fact, undeniable and often sublime, that 
as humanity has been constituted up to the present, 
war has been the means, more than any other agency, 
of bringing out on the grand scale that truth of sac- 
rifice without which flesh can never be made to serve 
the ends of spirit and the kingdom of the soul be 
won. This could be realised without war if only the 
race as a whole could be lifted to the requisite level. 
It often has been realised without war in individual 
cases, but never for long on the wider basis of the 
communal life. Please God, it will one day be uni- 
versally realised without war, and when that is so 
the cross of Christ will have won its final victory. 
For when people speak of religion as imperilled by 
the war they know not what they say; the very central 
principle of Christianity is that which the war with 
all its horrors has forced us to lift our faces from 
the flesh-pots and visualise afresh — namely, that 
life is only gained in proportion as it is laid down at 
the call of the higher-than-self. 

" A picket frozen on duty, 
A mother starved for her brood, 



WAR AND SACRIFICE 39 

Socrates drinking the hemlock, 

And Jesus on the rood; 

And the millions who, humble and nameless, 

The straight, hard pathway trod — 

Some of us call it duty, 

And others call it God." 

It needs no war to bring this home to us if only we 
have eyes to see and a mind to understand. Sac- 
rifice is always the same in essence, whatever be the 
occasion that calls it forth. In a play produced by 
Sir Herbert Tree some years ago, entitled False 
Gods, this truth was presented very forcibly. The 
scene was laid in ancient Egypt, and one of the prin- 
cipal characters was a young girl who was to be 
thrown into the Nile as a sacrifice to the gods in or- 
der to secure a plentiful harvest. The character was 
well played, and what struck me most in the perform- 
ance was the way the girl was represented as going 
to her death. On her face was a look of holy rap- 
ture and supersensuous joy. So intent was she on 
her self-oblation that she passed her weeping lover 
by without so much as seeing him; her gaze was 
fixed upon a sterner bridegroom. Should we call 
this superstition and wasted nobleness? Not so: 
there is no wasted nobleness. It matters little to 
what immediate object a sacrifice is made so that 
it be the best we can see. Perhaps none of the things 
we are willing to suffer and die for to-day are in- 
trinsically any worthier than those which awakened 
the Egyptian girl's heroism, but they have served 
their purpose in so far as they are the medium 



4 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

through which the eternal makes its demand upon 
our uttermost. We rise or fall by the nature of our 
response thereto. We die to live; we lose to find. 
And having passed the portals of the great self- 
offering to the Ideal, come in what guise it may, we 
find that, after all, there is no such thing as sacrifice 
in the sense of permanent loss or impoverishment. 
We only lay down a lesser to grasp a larger good; we 
surrender the part to possess the whole. That is 
what our dead heroes have already found on the 
other side of the red mist of war; and that is what 
we who weep for them will one day find too when 
we go to join them in the light that casts no shadow. 



CHAPTER VI 

PESSIMISM 
(Written from the Western front towards the end of 1915) 

Here on the table before me is a pile of newspapers, 
French and English. I have been reading both — 
the English with reluctance, the French with avidity. 
I want to see how the war is going, as far as the 
newspapers can tell us about it; and over here we are 
all hungry for news as you are in England. But I 
notice one curious contrast in the tone of these two 
sets of journals : the English are all angrily pessimis- 
tic, the French soberly optimistic. This is why I 
take up an English paper with apprehension and 
something of reluctance, and why I go to the French 
for a corrective. Perhaps not all the English papers 
are pessimistic nor all the French optimistic, but I am 
bound to say that most that have come my way, and 
they are not few, may fairly be thus described. Why 
the contrast? for contrast there undoubtedly is. 
The French are not cock-a-hoop, but neither are they 
depressing; the English were cock-a-hoop not so long 
ago, and now they seem to have formed a combine 
for the special purpose of disheartening everybody. 
Even those — I speak with all reserve as only having 
seen a limited number — which make it their busi- 

41 



42 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ness to counter the anti-Government tendencies of the 
rest seem to do so with a mournful air as who should 
say, " Well, at any rate, they shall not be able to 
accuse us of undue cheerfulness about prospects; we 
shall wear as sad a visage as they; we shall be careful 
not to over-estimate our chances in any wise." 
What on earth is the matter? Once on this side 
of the Channel I find myself in an entirely different 
atmosphere, psychologically speaking, from that of 
the London I left. There at home apparently you 
are still quarrelling and calling each other names, still 
demanding the resignation of this or that minister 
or of the whole cabinet, still putting the worst pos- 
sible construction upon what you don't understand. 
Here the people are quiet, calm, restrained, deter- 
mined as ever but without thought of harassing their 
civil or military administrations. I pick up a French 
paper and read of the operations in the Balkans or 
somewhere else ; I see that matters are grave, but I 
read encouraging words, words of hope and con- 
fidence that the best is being done that can be done to 
deal with the situation. Next day I pick up the Eng- 
lish screamer of the same date, relating the same 
events, describing exactly the same situation, and if 
I had not read the French the night before I should 
think all was lost and that the empire was on the very 
verge of dissolution. The French editor gives care- 
ful reasons for the general view he puts before his 
readers; the English editor does the same, or says 



PESSIMISM 43 

he does, but the conclusions are diametrically op- 
posite. 

Now I cannot think that this is because the French 
censorship is more strict than the British, and that 
editors are not allowed to write in this country what 
they would dearly like to write and would write if 
only they had the same chance as their English 
confreres. If that is all, for goodness' sake let us 
have the French censorship established in London 
without delay. But it is not all ; it is not the case in 
the least; the explanation must be sought other- 
where. Does not the English mood originate with 
a certain group of journals whose policy is directed 
from one source, and all the rest, like sheep, feel 
more or less bound to follow? Is there any other 
country in the world, I wonder, that would tolerate 
such a state of things? Perhaps it is to our credit 
that we do, but we do it at a cost. Any foreigner 
would be justified in supposing that the nation had got 
into a jumpy condition and was prepared for some 
wildcat scheme of revolution. I don't believe it; I 
think I know my countrymen too well; but at the 
moment it really does look as though Mr. Bernard 
Shaw were right in his whimsical portraiture of John 
Bull as anything but the staid, stolid, level-headed 
person he is supposed to be — nervous, indeed, and 
excitable to a degree, emotional and sentimental — 
whereas the Gaul, so far from being flighty, easily 
elated and depressed, voluble and blatant, and all 



44 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

the rest of it, is nothing if not cool, self-possessed, 
master of his fate, and able to take long views of the 
future as the Anglo-Saxon has never done. 

But consider the effect upon our troops, not to 
speak of the spirits of those at home. You may 
be cheerful by nature and principle, but it needs a 
good deal of resolution to stand up against a con- 
tinual deluge of dismal prophecies and scolding dis- 
content with what has or has not been done in the 
field up to date. Tommy reads the newspapers as 
regularly as you do, perhaps more so, for there is 
not much else to read. They are sent out to the 
seat of war just as systematically as they are sent 
all over the land at home. And he does not like 
all this grousing; he says so; it is not the kind of 
pabulum he wants. And, bear in mind, the Tommy 
of to-day is not the Tommy of old, not a professional 
soldier. He is a man who has left the desk, the 
forge, the loom, the mart, all the comforts and se- 
curities of home life to go and fight our battles and 
keep the foe from our gates. He need not have 
gone; he did not have to be fetched; he went because 
England needed strong hands and stout hearts to de- 
fend her, and he could not hold back. He is a man 
who yesterday sat by our firesides or worked with us 
at the bench or in the countinghouse, and we know 
him well. Is it fair to discourage him, to minimise 
his achievements, to take the heart out of him by 
grumbling at the slowness of his progress? God in 



PESSIMISM 45 

heaven, I wonder what the Germans think about 
that! If they hate us to-day with a black and 
fiendish hatred it is because this new Tommy of ours 
has so unexpectedly and effectively barred their prog- 
ress. They never reckoned with a voluntary army 
of three million men of England's best blood, the 
biggest voluntary army, remember, that the world 
has ever seen. Where would Europe have been to- 
day without that army, not to speak of our glorious 
fleet, as glorious to-day as it ever was? The French 
know it and appreciate it, I can tell you. They know 
well enough what would have become of them by now 
if there had been no Britons to stand by their side. 
It is no disparagement to the Tommy of old to say 
that the new man is quite equal to him in all es- 
sentials. The Tommy of old held back the Huns 
like a hero in the long retreat from Mons, but there 
are not many of him left now. Had that little 
British force not been there during that terrible first 
onrush of the overwhelming German hordes there 
would have been no need to talk of how much or how 
little we have done since, for the campaign would 
have been over in a few weeks, with France possibly 
down and out before she was ready to get in her 
famous counter-stroke. We were more promptly 
on the spot than our allies and bore the brunt of the 
contest against such odds as no army has had to face 
since on any front. We have done an hundred-fold 
more than we ever undertook to do or thought of 



46 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

doing a year and a half ago. Granted, you say, but 
not more than was necessary, not more than our allies 
have a right to expect now to save the situation for 
us all; we are fighting the most desperate fight of our 
whole existence as a people, and are in the deadliest 
peril ; is not our utmost called for and at once ? Yes, 
yes, but why take way off the ship by badgering the 
captain and the men in the engine-room? Let them 
alone and do your own bit; you are not likely to im- 
prove on them by bringing new and untried men on 
to the bridge while the storm is raging. Try to con- 
ceive the miracle of this new army of ours that has 
arisen out of nothing within the space of a year. See 
how it has baffled an enemy that for forty years has 
been thinking about nothing else but war and organi- 
sation for war. Understand that it is not we but 
Germany that will have to look out when the supreme 
tussle comes. Man for man, our men are better than 
their foes are now, and will be more so as time goes 
on. The Balkans? I know all that can be said 
about our diplomatic failures and the rest of it, by 
those who do not know and cannot know the facts 
from the inside. Perhaps when the whole story is 
told our blunders in this respect will not turn out to 
have been so very bad, after all. Perhaps before 
long Germany may have cause to rue the day she 
tied herself up in the Balkans. I know all the other 
dangers people are whispering about, dangers in our 
rear out there, dangers of disaffection among sub- 



PESSIMISM 47 

ject races who have hitherto held us invincible and 
now see that we are not. Well, let us have the whole 
truth; we shall be none the worse for knowing it. 
We are not finished with yet, and would not be if all 
the woes imagined by all the dismal Jimmies came 
true together. Mistakes we have made, heaps of 
them — tragic mistakes some of them — and we 
shall make more before we have done, but we are 
not going under, and I don't suppose there is a soul 
in the world who really believes it. 

It is to the quality of our men that I pin my faith. 
It does one good to be among them and to witness 
their invincible cheerfulness, gaiety, indomitable 
spirit in face of wounds and death. These men are 
not going to be beaten, you may depend upon it. 
Simple, honest, boyish, without a trace of self-con- 
sciousness, they make it a point of honour never to 
whine at anything, and they never do. The harder 
conditions may be the louder rise laughter and song 
from their midst. The French contrast with them 
rather curiously in these ways just now. They are 
grave, silent, undemonstrative — an exact reversal 
of what the world has grown to expect from them. 
There is no slackening of determination anywhere, 
but it is strange to find the phlegmatic Briton exhibit- 
ing the very characteristics which are supposed to 
belong more especially to the French race, whereas 
the Frenchman has for the time being assumed an- 
other air. It is rare, indeed, to meet a French regi- 



4 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ment making any demonstration on the march; they 
tramp on quiet and steady, without song or jest. 
The British Tommy, on the other hand, never stops 
making fun and melody. The day I landed I met 
two British regiments swinging along at a good 
smart pace towards the sea, raising no end of din as 
they went through the streets, calling out good-hu- 
moured remarks to the people at the windows, chaff- 
ing one another, cheering at intervals, joining in some 
popular chorus occasionally. It was sheer light- 
headedness that was thus finding vent in one and all ; 
the only grave face I saw was that of the officer in 
front, and his eyes were twinkling. Naturally I 
thought they must be going home on leave, so I 
asked if it were so. Not a bit of it. They were not 
going to the sea but to the train, and within an hour 
or two would be in the trenches. I wished I could 
have made the editor of the Daily Mail do a route 
march alongside of them; it would have been a tonic 
to his shattered nerves. 

It was bitterly cold in camp the other Sunday 
morning, a cutting north-easter blowing and torrents 
of sleet falling. I had to take church parade and 
was waiting the summons shiveringly. Not being 
in a state of health just now to run risks I made for 
the only fire I could find — namely, that in the cook- 
ing range of a camp kitchen. You should have seen 
that kitchen after a few score muddy feet had been 
across it, and then realise that practically every man 



PESSIMISM 49 

doing duty in it was as accustomed to home com- 
forts as I was. They insisted on placing a chair for 
me in the warmest corner near the stove, where I 
stood a good chance of being roasted along with the 
joint. And then the fun began. Not far away a 
French youth was bargaining with the corporal — 
about eggs, I think it was — and the merriment that 
ensued over the efforts of the two to understand each 
other's language was side-splitting. Jacques said 
something about " oblige." " Lizzie? " roared the 
corporal. " Don't you come trotting out your Liz- 
zies here. We're respectable, we are. None of 
your Lizzies for me. But p'raps you mean ' lazy ' ? 
Right you are, sonny, right first time. Lazy we are, 
sure enough, every man of us, but we never get a 
proper chance to develop our talent, and not much 
likelihood of it, either, from what I can see. Com- 
pron that, eh? Have a cigarette (sticking it be- 
tween the Frenchman's teeth). Why don't you say 
'mercy,' you blighter? Have I got to teach you 
your own language and your manners as well ? " 
Roars of laughter greeted each sally, the French- 
man's loudest of all. A large iron ladle greatly as- 
sisted the corporal in punctuating his points. My 
description is only the feeblest attempt to convey the 
actual comicality and joyousness of the whole in- 
terlude. " Mercy " was in frequent requisition as 
the nearest approach Tommy could make to 
" merci " ; it came out in nearly every sentence. 



50 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

cl Bong Jewer," they shouted, as their visitor took 
his leave with many bows. Tommy bowing back 
was the funniest incident of all. 

The psychological differences between the two 
races are continually obvious, however. I am not 
sure that we should ever fully understand the French 
people or they us. We can like and amuse each 
other, but that is another matter. Some little time 
back, in illustration of this, a few of our soldiers went 
to purchase sweets at a shop in the village not far 
away. While the proprietress was serving them her 
wounded son came out, and, seeing his English 
brothers-in-arms, drew himself up, struck an atti- 
tude, and, pointing to the lapel of his coat whereon 
the coveted distinction gleamed, exclaimed in dra- 
matic accents, " Medaille militaire moi ! " The Tom- 
mies instantly laughed at him — good-naturedly, of 
course, but to his utter bewilderment. His action 
was as characteristically French as it was absolutely 
un-English. I got the story at second-hand but have 
no doubt it is true. 

All hail to Tommy, and confusion to those who 
would make his task harder ! Get rid of the grum- 
blers and back him up with all our united strength 
and confidence. And the best way to do that is to 
back up those who have the responsibility of leader- 
ship in their hands. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE HIGHER COMMAND 

Here is a coincidence worth telling about. I was 
just sitting down to write something on the above 
subject when a letter came in containing the following 
story told on the authority of one of our wounded 
Australian heroes. He says the bravest man he ever 
saw was a Wesleyan military chaplain. He was on 
one of the barges which were landing men from our 
troopships at the Dardanelles. A man was shot 
down. The chaplain made to dash to the rescue and 
bring the wounded soldier back to safety, but a Cath- 
olic priest standing near grabbed hold of him, say- 
ing, " You mustn't think of it; it is madness; you are 
going to certain death." The Wesleyan shook off 
the restraining hand, replying, " I have got my or- 
ders, and they come from a higher command than 
yours, and I'm going." He went, and was struck 
by a bullet while in the act of beginning his work of 
mercy. Instantly the priest sprang after him, but 
the officer in charge of the landing party called out, 
" Stay where you are; I forbid your going; we are 
losing too many men." The priest calmly went on, 
only turning his head to say as he passed, " Did you 
not hear what my Protestant comrade said? I too 

5i 



52 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

have got my orders — from the higher command." 
Within a few moments he lay dead beside his brother 
of the Cross. 

This is a fine story, only one of many similar 
stories that one is hearing on every hand and most 
of which will never be printed. It is amazing how 
splendid men can be, and women too, under the stress 
of a great demand such as the present hour is making 
upon us all. The Prime Minister told us recently 
that before the war we did not know we possessed 
so much of this wonderful moral quality in the nation 
and the empire. I confess I did not, and most of 
those with whom I have talked about it agree that 
they did not either. We all wondered, everybody 
wondered, whether the Briton of to-day, at home or 
oversea, had quite the grit of his ancestors. It 
only needed a great world crisis to show it, and here 
it is as of yore. 

But the thing I am thinking most of at the moment 
in connection with it is the strange compelling power 
possessed by this inner imperative, this higher com- 
mand, that makes ordinary everyday folk capable of 
such mighty deeds. Where does it come from and 
what is it? It is a queer thing, this higher command, 
and takes the most curious forms. A reckless, 
devil-may-care sailor is taken prisoner by dervishes 
and told that he may save his life by forswearing 
Christianity and becoming convert to Islam. He 
says he will see them damned first, and dies a martyr 



THE HIGHER COMMAND 53 

to the faith he has never greatly honoured by his 
life. Now, why on earth should a man do that? 
He might very well shelter himself under the plea 
of necessity and bide his time. But, no, he will have 
no truck with the alternative; something inside him 
will not let him, something whose condemnation he 
is much more afraid of than he is of death. I have 
just been talking to a wounded private soldier lying 
in a tent hospital. He is only a boy, and a delicate 
boy at that, but here he is, after seven months in 
the trenches, smashed up for life, if he ever succeeds 
in getting well, which I doubt, and the busy, kindly 
military doctors and nurses doubt too. He comes 
from Lancashire — Wigan, I think he said — and he 
looks it even if his speech did not betray him, such 
a strong face he has and such an independent, manly 
mode of addressing his visitor. Something of his 
story and his views of life has come out in our inter- 
course. He worked in an iron foundry but has never 
earned good wages. His health has been partly 
to blame for that, but circumstances have been to 
blame also, and he is rather resentful about it and 
curses our unjust social system with all his might. 
Undoubtedly it has been hard on him; he has known 
little but struggle and dull drudgery all his days, 
and even starvation has threatened him more than 
once. He does not remember his father; his mother 
was early left a widow with a young family to bring 
up, and wondrously she did it, as so many intrepid 



54 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

women similarly placed have had to do and will 
have to do still more when war has taken its toll 
complete. He seems to have no thought now but 
for his mother, whereby I can guess what kind of 
mother she must have been — " mutther " he calls 
her in his broad Lancashire dialect, or the nearest 
approach I can make to it with the pen. He wishes 
she wouldn't u wurry"; he will be "aw reet." 
That he will, however it goes. Poor mother ! She 
has another lad, he says, lying in a bloody grave 
somewhere on the Belgian frontier, and there are no 
more left now to look after her as good sons should 
— only daughters, one of them a permanent invalid, 
to weep with her and battle on alone. He would 
like to get better because of this, but has got " t' 
parson " to write and cheer her up and tell her it 
will be " aw reet " anyhow. And then he falls to 
talking with extraordinary bitterness of the totally 
unnecessary hardship of the lot of the toiling poor 
at home in England — foolish, luxurious, pleasure- 
loving, ill-directed, scrambling, shambling England. 
He is an intelligent youth and knows what he is talk- 
ing about ; he has read a good deal and thought more, 
and takes a fairly active part in local labour politics, 
or did before the war. Religion he appears to have 
left mostly to " mutther." 

Here again I am filled with wonder and respect. 
I ask myself what England has ever done for this 
young fellow that he should leave his mother to suffer 



THE HIGHER COMMAND 55 

and mourn while he goes to fight and die for mother- 
land — or is it something else of which motherland 
is but the most convenient symbol? I don't think 
he knows himself, although he is under no illusions 
about the course he has chosen. I put the question 
to him. " Well, ye see," he answers slowly, " it's 
a man's job. A man canna slink and hide when 
there's a job o' this sort goin'." He could give no 
further explanation. Here were two commands, 
two ideals if you like, mutually incompatible; one, 
very much more than the other, exceedingly dan- 
gerous and disagreeable; but he knew which he had 
to obey, and he knew without being able to give a 
very clear reason for his choice. Dimly appre- 
hended, perhaps, was the knowledge that in fighting 
England's battle just now he was fighting for a 
greater than England, for all that is sweet, and dear, 
and wholesome in human lot, for the future of the 
entire race, for things better and more worthful than 
good wages and abundant leisure, or even the re- 
finements of life that these can provide, for liberty, 
comradeship, democratic ideals as opposed to Prus- 
sianism and all its blighting, terrifying menace. 
Was that it? I cannot tell; I think so; but I feel 
also — nay, I am sure — that behind all this is a 
motive, an incentive, that never can be completely 
rationalised, a needsmust which has more of heaven 
than of earth in it. We may be willing to die for 
one thing to-day and another to-morrow, but it is al- 



56 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ways the same thing in the end, the Eternal Right. 
We never know what it is, but it is always calling to 
us, always calling, and when we hear the summons 
our dearest treasures drop unheeded from our hands 
and we turn with averted mien from the contempla- 
tion of our heart's desires to lift our gaze to the 
shining heights whereon a glory beckons that is not 
of earth alone. As Francis Thompson phrases it — 

" I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds ; 
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
From the hid battlements of Eternity; 
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again. 
But not ere him who summoneth 
I first have seen, enwound 

With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned; 
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith." 

In all of us there is this strange, mystical suscep- 
tibility, call it what you will, this urge to lay all we 
have and are upon the altar of some inaffable ideal 
that we feel has the right to demand our uttermost. 
I know of nothing that so fully demonstrates man's 
spiritual nature; it is the one great fact that differ- 
entiates us from the brutes. All history through 
you find it running. On the one hand you have man 
selfish, greedy, earth-bound, cunning, false, and sor- 
did in his aims; on the other, at repeated intervals, 
in great and solemn hours, comes this austere appeal 
for all we have to give, and we promptly give it, 
joyously, willingly, without thought of reward, and 
derive a greater satisfaction from that self-giving 



THE HIGHER COMMAND 57 

than from all other kinds of gain put together. It 
is deep, mysterious, elusive, this stress of the spirit, 
but we all know it unmistakably, as all generations 
have known it. Perhaps there is nothing so strong 
in human nature as this impulse to fling ourselves 
away at the bidding of we know not what, the some- 
thing ever blessed that incarnates itself now in this 
course or objective and now in that. Assuredly 
there is nothing so exalting within the totality of hu- 
man experience. Show me the man or the nation 
without it and I will show you man or nation damned 
and lost. The lower command, the command of ex- 
pediency and common sense, the command of con- 
ventionality and established order, or the dictate of 
self-love insists, Be tranquil, remain secure, jeopar- 
dise nothing, disturb nobody, hold on with care to 
what you possess, take no risks; the higher com- 
mand thrusts all prudentialisms aside and cries, Give 
me all, I will have nothing less. It is madness to 
listen if we want to be safe, but we do listen and al- 
ways will. And does the specific requirement 
through which the call comes ever matter in itself? 
Hardly at all, I should think; what matters is our 
response. Leonidas and his Spartans perish to a 
man at Thermopylae — for what? For King Con- 
stantine and the degenerate nation he rules to-day? 
In God's name, no; it would have mattered little for 
hundreds of years past if the Greece they saved had 
been wiped off the map. They thought they were 



58 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

dying for Greece — and so they were, for the Greece 
of the moment, for the Greece from which we have 
inherited our ideals of the beautiful and gracious in 
life — but if they were not dying for more than 
Greece their death was a tragedy unrelieved. They 
were dying for the soul of man, and to an extent they 
must have been conscious of it, dying for a world 
unborn and a greater world unseen; upon their own 
triumph of soul they rose to the threshold of that 
which is beyond manhood as manhood is beyond the 
beast and the clod; they achieved more than they 
understood or tried for. People have died before 
now for what to our perception was not worth a mo- 
ment's discomfort, but we are wrong and they were 
right. An ancient city is besieged, and the oracle 
goes forth that the only way to save it is for the 
king's virgin daughter, or some one else of equal 
rank and worth, the best and fairest that the com- 
munity can produce, to be offered in burnt sacrifice 
upon the walls. The girl consents and goes to her 
doom amid the awestricken prayers and blessings 
of the multitude of onlookers. What gods were 
they that required this deed before they would in 
terfere between these folk and their enemies with 
out? None; the offering placated no blood-drink 
ing deity; but it achieved its purpose all the same 
The elevation of soul required in the one who will 
ingly died for the rest was communicated more or 
less to them all, and for ever ; who cares now whether 



THE HIGHER COMMAND 59 

the city fell or not? When Edmund Campion, after 
being bruised and broken on the rack, was compelled 
to sit for three hours arguing intricate theological 
propositions with his Puritan judges before being 
dragged through the streets on a hurdle to be hanged 
at Tyburn, the martyr thought he was witnessing for 
the truth of God, the truth to which all Christendom 
would speedily return. Was he? He died like a 
hero, no man could have died better, but would it 
have been well for the world that the Cause repre- 
sented by the Inquisition and the Spanish Armada 
should have prevailed over that of Frobisher and 
Drake? I trow not. Yet Campion died for Eng- 
land as surely as they, for that spiritual England 
which had been slowly built up through the centuries, 
on the other side of death as on this, may be, by the 
glorious self-devotion of her sons. 

There are clever men who tell us that the higher 
command is only a mode of what is commonly called 
conscience, and that conscience is only the survival 
in the individual of the instinct for social self- 
preservation. It has been found in generations past 
that some forms of action tend to social detriment 
and others to social benefit; the former have social 
penalties attached to them and the latter social ap- 
proval, so that in time everybody comes to feel that 
the one kind of act is blameworthy and the other 
praiseworthy — hence conscience. But that will not 
do; it does not explain sufficiently. It does not ex- 



60 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

plain why the social pioneer so often has to take a 
line in direct defiance of the accepted standards of 
his time. " Here stand I, I can none other " has 
been the testimony of many a reformer besides 
Luther; expressed or implied it is the testimony of 
them all. But the higher command I am writing 
about can scarcely be classed as conscience; it has 
affinities with it but goes beyond it. Conscience 
warns or inhibits, marks this wrong and the other 
right, is concerned with " thou shalt " or " thou shalt 
not." But when the higher command comes in 
like a flood it swallows up, transmutes, sweeps away 
all merely moral maxims in its torrential course. 
Right is comparatively seldom a clear issue; there 
is nearly always a conflict of duties apparent. But 
once let the higher command be heard, heard with 
that trumpet note in it which all the world knows 
so well, and these scruples and balancings are for- 
gotten, and an exultant joy in losing everything, 
forsaking everything, crucifying everything dear to 
the natural man takes their place. We no longer 
ask, Is this right or is that wrong? We overleap 
all such alternatives. We are plunged, merged, lost 
in the transcendental claim; we forget all else or 
only remember it to consecrate it to the one high 
end; if .we had a thousand lives they should all go 
the same way, and home, kindred, hearts' beloved, 
all should follow with it. Witness Serbia to-day, 
old men, sick men, women, girls, little children dying 



THE HIGHER COMMAND 61 

with arms in their hands. This is Serbia's hour of 
agony and glory. Her people are not merely being 
defeated, they are being exterminated. They need 
not be, and at first sight one wonders why they 
should consent to be; all they have got to do is to 
throw down their arms and submit to the invader; 
they might have to suffer a little more, endure an 
ignominious subjection, but at least this tide of 
slaughter would be stayed. And they will not; the 
world with parted lips and straining eyes beholds 
that they will not. And yet these very people, not 
so long ago, were mean, ignorant, chaffering, thieving 
petty traders and pig-breeders. Any who have had 
to deal with them know they were no models of all 
the virtues. They could trifle with conscience or 
silence it altogether with the best (or worst) of us. 
So it ever is. The higher command tears the 
meanness out of us like a tornado sweeping through 
a smelly township and hurling all its foulness away 
in a moment on the wings of the blast. It trans- 
forms our whole being — unless we deliberately close 
our ears and bury ourselves out of reach of its peal- 
ing summons. You do not recognise these giants of 
the storm? they are the very men who yesterday 
shared your petty sins and pettier pleasures, these 
men who are to-day behaving like demi-gods. They 
have been touched by the magic of the higher com- 
mand and all their little vices have dropped from 



62 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

them like withered leaves when the burst of spring- 
time comes. They have broken their fetters and 
clasped hands with the immortals. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ABOUT PACIFISM 

(Written before compulsion became law) 

The time is drawing rapidly near when it may be 
necessary for the Prime Minister to make good his 
work and exercise compulsion upon those men of 
military age who have not voluntarily joined the 
colours to defend their country in her hour of need. 
If Lord Haldane is right, and he ought to know, 
special legislation may not even be necessary for this 
step, it being a maxim of the British Constitution 
from the earliest times to the present day that it is 
the duty of every freeman to bear arms in the na- 
tion's cause when called upon to do so by the nation's 
voice. I for one devoutly hope that we shall never 
have to resort to compulsion; it would take away 
something from the splendour of our national 
achievements in the field and elsewhere since the war 
began if the confession had to be made that volun- 
tarism had broken down and that there were still 
a considerable number of England's able-bodied sons 
who refused to fight for her. 

But if compulsion does come we may have diffi- 
culties, so I am told, with some — there cannot 
surely be very many - — who are conscientiously op- 

63 



64 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

posed to the shedding of blood whether in their 
country's cause or any other, and whether that cause 
is a so-called righteous one or not. No cause can be 
righteous, these persons would argue, which involves 
strife and the exercise of brute force between one 
people and another any more than between one indi- 
vidual and another. War, they hold, is a barbarous 
and wicked method of settling international disputes; 
it is, as Mr. Norman Angell would say, irrelevant 
to the issue; but even if it were not, even if its cost 
to the victors were not out of all proportion greater 
than any material gain likely to be achieved, it is 
still reprehensible from every ethical point of view; 
better lose all than fight to keep any. So reasoning, 
certain among these good people are prepared to un- 
dergo imprisonment, spoliation of their goods, and 
perhaps death itself rather than join the army. 

There are other people who are perplexed in mind 
about this question from the purely Christian stand- 
point, though not a few of them are already doing 
their utmost, in the army and out of it, to help to 
defeat the Germans and save Europe. I had an 
instance of this brought to my notice some months 
ago. A fine young fellow who had just enlisted said 
to me : "I feel I must do my bit for the old country 
along with others; we are all up against it, and I just 
cannot hang back while other men are being smashed 
and killed in a cause that is as much mine as theirs. 
But I am quite well aware that what I am doing is 



ABOUT PACIFISM 6s 

not Christian, but the very opposite, if we are to do 
what Jesus Christ told us to do." 

Now is that really so? This is a question that 
ought to be frankly and honestly faced, for they are 
not all cowards who put it. Is it generally known, I 
wonder, that certain Quakers, whose pacifist prin- 
ciples forbid them to fight, have from the beginning 
of the war been engaged in the hazardous service of 
mine-sweeping in the North Sea and elsewhere? 
Persons who are willing to jeopardise their own lives 
in such an intrepid fashion as this are entitled to 
full respect in differing from their neighbours on the 
subject of war in general. Ought a Christian ever, 
under any circumstances, to fight or approve of fight- 
ing? Can a true follower of the Prince of Peace 
consent to or take part in the shedding of human 
blood on the battlefield or, indeed, anywhere? I 
believe it was Dr. Salter of Bermondsey, a man 
whose self-sacrificing labours among the poor com- 
mand universal admiration, who said somewhere 
with reference to the present colossal struggle, that 
it was impossible to imagine Jesus bayoneting any- 
body or tearing human flesh and bones to pieces with 
explosives. A good many people feel that way; it 
would shock them to think of their Lord under any 
such aspect. This troubles them, as well it might, 
for what is out of character for Christ, what would 
be wrong for Him, ought to be wrong for us — on 
this question, anyhow. And then there are His 



66 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

recorded words. Everybody knows them. He in- 
culcated non-resistance, the turning of the other cheek 
to the smiter, and substituted the law of love for that 
of the resentment of injuries. What are we to say 
about this? I should not like to say what some of 
the German divines appear to find to say on the sub- 
ject. Pastor Lober of Leipzig, for instance, ap- 
pears to have been preaching on Christianity and 
War and putting views before his congregation that 
ought to please the Prussian and the Turk. Every 
one, he maintains, serves God who makes the blood 
of an enemy flow, and it is because he is thus serving 
God that he can reckon on God's blessing. The 
admonition of the New Testament to return good 
for evil cannot be applied in war. In war evil must 
be met by evil, and wherever possible by greater and 
increased evil. War demands Old Testament sever- 
ity, not the mildness of the new dispensation. He is 
to be praised and envied who sees his enemies perish. 
This, he concludes, is only another side of love for 
one's country, this desire for thorough revenge on 
the malicious enemy. " We beflag our houses, we 
ring our bells, and sing ' Now thank we all our God ' 
when countless multitudes of Russians meet a ter- 
rible death in the Masurian swamps, or when two 
thousand seamen are plunged to the bottom of the 
ocean by our submarines. And such expressions of 
gratitude and joy are genuinely German and genu- 
inely Christian." These are Pastor Lober's words, 



ABOUT PACIFISM 67 

remember, not mine, and are, indeed, the genuine 
German blend of vindictive murderousness with 
abominable pietism. They remind one of Punch's 
sarcastic paraphrase of the first German emperor's 
letters to his wife on the debacle of the French armies 
in 1870-71. 

" I write to tell you, dear Augusta, 
We've had another awful buster: 
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below, 
Praise God from whom all blessings flow." 

But we need not emulate this blasphemous tosh. 
The question for us is whether it is ever right to meet 
force with force. We have to look to something 
besides the letter of Scripture here. You can prove 
almost anything from Scripture, and the mere citing 
of isolated texts is a profitless proceeding. We have 
to look at Scripture as interpreted by the mind of 
the Church during nineteen centuries. From the 
first the right of the State to make use of force, even 
to the taking of human life, was admitted by the 
Church, and from that admission she has never de- 
viated. This must include the right, even the duty 
under certain circumstances, to make war; for the 
principle thus set forth extends much further than 
the coercion of the subject. If the State has the 
right to judge and condemn a criminal within her 
own borders — and who would question it? — she 
has the right to resist unjust aggression from without 
or even to interfere on behalf of the oppressed and 



68 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

down-trodden beyond the area of her sovereign jur- 
isdiction. Surely in taking this ground — which 
she did even in New Testament times, as we see from 
the Pauline epistles — the Church has all along 
known the mind of her Lord. Is it so certain that 
Jesus would not have sanctioned the taking of human 
life? What distinction is there between the taking 
of life and the employment of any other method than 
that of moral suasion in the overthrow of iniquity? 
and it is as clear as clear can be that our Lord did 
contemplate bringing force to bear in the long run 
upon human wrong-doing; His teaching about the 
last things leaves no room for doubt about this, and 
the force was to be employed by Himself. People 
seem to forget this when talking about the example 
of Jesus. It was only up to a point that He meant 
to tolerate men's wickedness or appeal to their bet- 
ter nature ; beyond that point He declared He would 
overthrow it with a strong hand, and it makes not 
the slightest difference to the question at issue that 
He expected to be supported by heavenly rather than 
earthly legions in so doing; the principle is just the 
same; there is to be a consecrated use of force to 
counter and overthrow force enlisted on the side of 
evil. Nor can we absolutely restrict the participa- 
tion in the struggle to angel hosts. That strange 
book called Revelation, not one of the latest in the 
New Testament, indicates otherwise in its myste- 
rious allusions to Armageddon — a word often on 



ABOUT PACIFISM 69 

the lips of journalists and public speakers to describe 
the present European conflict — and to a final and 
terrific trial of strength between the embattled forces 
of evil and those of good on the stage of human af- 
fairs. It is not all allegorical; it is a world war that 
is spoken of. 

Moreover, our Lord's own very emphatic words 
about non-resistance are plainly addressed to the 
individual and are concerned with the avenging of 
personal affronts. He never told us to turn any one 
else's cheek to the smiter, which is just the point; 
and He never said a single word about refusing to 
obey the call of the State to defend one's home and 
kindred by force of arms. That the Church never 
understood Him to mean that is plain from her 
practice in the early centuries. There were plenty 
of Christian soldiers in the imperial armies; being a 
Christian did not disqualify a man for undertaking 
such a service. On the abstract principle there is no 
room for doubt; Christianity has always recognised 
that the executive of the State " beareth not the 
sword in vain." It is not so easy to say where the 
limitations of that authority come in; in the last 
resort that is a matter for the individual conscience to 
settle; it might be a Christian duty to refuse to shed 
blood in a bad cause at the bidding of the State or 
any other authority. In the early days to which I 
have already alluded there were martyrs who died 
rather than fight just as there were martyrs who died 



7 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

rather than render divine honours to Caesar. I am 
only pointing out, and it is well worth emphasising, 
that from the very first the Christian Church as a 
whole did admit that under certain eventualities un- 
defined the State had the right to make war and 
therefore the right to require its subjects to serve in 
its armies. The Christian ideal was universal peace ; 
but in such a very unideal world as ours it had to be 
acknowledged that on the way to universal peace it 
might be sometimes the duty of a Christian to draw 
the sword. 

I am not insisting that war itself is a good. It is 
not a good; pain in itself never is; war may be a 
necessary purgation of the body politic, a bracing up 
of the energies of the soul; but it is a grim remedy 
even at the best. It is no more a good than a 
surgical operation is a good; it may be necessary to 
get rid of a disease, but it would be better not to have 
the disease to begin with. We have to distinguish 
between what is ideally and what is practically right. 
The Christian ideal of marriage, for example, is the 
union of one man and one woman for life on the basis 
of pure mutual affection and loyalty, but in practice 
we have to recognise that it is not always attainable 
with human nature as it is, and we legislate accord- 
ingly. The Christian ideal, again, is that of the 
angel song at the birth of the world's Redeemer, 
" Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, 
good will among men " ; but while tyranny, op- 



ABOUT PACIFISM 71 

pression, and cruelty remain there must be war. 
But, further, I utterly and entirely dissent from 
the view that there is something essentially uplifting 
in a war as war. The late Mr. Lecky, in his History 
of European Morals, says : " That which invests war, 
in spite of all the evils that attend it, with a certain 
moral grandeur, is the heroic self-sacrifice it elicits. 
With perhaps the single exception of the Church, it 
is the sphere in which mercenary motives have least 
sway, in which performance is least weighed and 
measured by strict obligation, in which a disinterested 
enthusiasm has most scope. A battlefield is the scene 
of deeds of self-sacrifice so transcendent, and at the 
same time so dramatic, that, in spite of all its horrors 
and crimes, it awakens the most passionate moral 
enthusiasm." Is there no other way of arousing 
this moral enthusiasm, no other way of evoking to 
the same degree the spirit of self-sacrifice? Yes, if 
civilisation as a whole could rise to the moral level 
requisite for it. The late Professor William James 
of Harvard used to maintain that one great thing 
which modern civilisation had yet to do was to find 
a moral substitute for war, an incentive to action 
that would bring out the grandest qualities of human 
nature without the accompaniment of slaughter and 
the suffering and anguish that follow in its train. 
Oh that we were sufficiently great of soul to do it, 
and to do it as one man ! Every normal human be- 
ing must dread, loathe, and detest war, for if it re- 



72 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

veals some things that savour of heaven it reveals 
more that reek of hell. See what the glorification 
of war has done for Germany. I have not the 
slightest hesitation in admitting that as a people the 
Germans are intellectually better trained and more 
efficient than we, their resources better organised 
and developed, their manhood better disciplined and 
equipped for the business of life in its material as- 
pects. But look at the temper of mind that goes 
with it — hard, arrogant, domineering, unable to 
appreciate the rights of others or even to understand 
others' point of view. It has given Germany the 
most unscrupulous government of modern times; for 
as sure as you get a nation mastered by the monster 
of militarism, a nation in which everything else in 
administration is subordinated to militaristic ideals, 
you get a Government without sentiment, without 
humanity, without respect for the ordinary obliga- 
tions of truth and honour. Two ideals of the State 
confront each other on the battlefield to-day ; for the 
sake of the future welfare of mankind which were 
it better should prevail? I think we could fairly 
appeal to civilisation on that issue alone without fear 
of the verdict. Is the State a moral entity or is it 
not? Our enemies hold that whatever the State 
chooses to do it may do if it thinks it to be for its ad- 
vantage, that considerations of right and wrong have 
no meaning as applied to the State; no question of 
conscience must deter the individual from carrying 



ABOUT PACIFISM 73 

out its behests. A more cynical doctrine the world 
has never heard. If Germany were to win this war 
that doctrine would be triumphant; it is for us to 
determine that it shall not be. We war not for re- 
venge nor for our own aggrandisement; we war to 
set mankind free from a bondage under which it has 
groaned for generations, Germany even more than 
ourselves. We are fighting the battle of the Ger- 
man people as well as our own, paradoxical though 
it seem to say so. We are fighting the battle of 
America as well as of Europe, and America knows 
it. We are fighting for democratic institutions, for 
international justice, for the right of the weak to 
live in safety alongside of the strong. International 
Law has broken down; we have got to rebuild it. 
Political and social idealism has been swept under 
by this flood of cultured barbarism from Berlin; we 
have got to restore it to its proper place. We are 
warring to end war if we can. The world has an 
object lesson before it to-day as to what militarism 
leads to. Heaven grant that the outcome of the 
present awful collision of spiritual and material 
forces may be the end of militarism and, as our 
Prime Minister said a year ago, the creation of a 
pact of the nations to prevent it from ever lifting 
its head again, not in Germany only, but anywhere 
else throughout the world. 



CHAPTER IX 

IF I WERE GOD 

"Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodde: 
Hae mercy o' ray soul, Lord God ; 
As I wad do were I Lord God, 
And ye were Martin Elginbrodde." 

This striking epitaph, quoted by George Macdonald, 
is said, though I cannot be sure, to have been placed 
on the tombstone of some individual of Norse ex- 
traction buried in the north of Scotland. The Norse 
element in certain parts of Scotland has contributed 
not a little to the characeristic sturdiness and inde- 
pendence of her people and to the great part they 
have played in the world in modern times. I hope 
it is true that this inscription does appear, or once 
did appear, in a Scottish graveyard. To my mind 
there is something rather fine about it, without a 
trace of irreverence or presumption. Something 
similar is recorded as having been uttered in France 
in the fifteenth century or thereabouts by a famous 
captain of freebooters named La Hire, though not 
with the simple dignity of the verse given above. 
According to Hallam, this worthy was not addicted 
to spending much time over his devotions and was 
found fault with thereupon. He held, however, 
that his mode of praying was as effective as any one 

74 



IF I WERE GOD 75 

else's. Before going into battle he would address 
Heaven thus: " So do with me this day, God, as I 
would do with thee if I were God and thou wert La 
Hire." This bold, even audacious, anthropomorph- 
ism, this drawing of a likeness between man and 
God, makes one great assumption — namely, that 
divine goodness is at least equal to human and not 
different in kind. The crudity of the sentiment in 
other ways need not blind us to the value of this. 
That it puts man and God over against each other, 
as it were, as distinct entities, regarding God as a 
kind of larger man, but stronger, abler, and in pos- 
session of fuller information, holding a supreme 
magisterial office to which we are amenable, need 
not disturb us. Perhaps no religious proposition 
that has ever been framed has altogether escaped 
this inherent anthropomorphism or could do so. Do 
what we will, when we think of God, or, rather, 
when we think of the character of God (if I may 
be permitted the use of that not very satisfactory ex- 
pression), we are more or less compelled to compare 
Him with man. We do it as a matter of course, 
even when we are not conscious of it. And we have 
high authority for doing it; in fact, the highest au- 
thority that has ever found expression through hu- 
man lips, that of Christ himself, When He said, 
" If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall your father 
which is in heaven give good things to them that ask 



76 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

him? " He was saying much the same as La Hire 
and Martin Elginbrod, after all. He was bidding 
us estimate the goodness of God by the best we have 
learned to know of the goodness of man. 

And yet we ought to be careful in our employ- 
ment of this comparison. Obviously we cannot 
press it so far as to make it explain all the ways of 
God in His dealings with His creatures. God is 
not a larger man, viewing life from man's restricted 
standpoint and subject to the same limitation of feel- 
ing and action. He is the life of all that is, the in- 
finitely complex reality that is finding manifestation 
in the world of worlds, present in every grain of dust 
as in the farthest star. Without Him nothing ex- 
ists; in Him is all that is or ever shall be. To quote 
the words of one of the greatest of the world's spir- 
itual seers, words that everybody knows without 
stopping to ponder them, " In Him we live, and 
move, and have our being." How can we then 
enclose Him in human categories when we want to 
discuss His attributes? At least we must keep our 
thoughts clear while we attempt it. Of no man can 
it be said that others live, and move, and have their 
being in his; no man indwells any other being than 
his own except in a very limited and special sense ; 
no man is the creator and sustainer of any universe, 
however small. As a matter of fact, no man ever 
creates anything, he only discovers. He works with 
nature and nature reveals her secrets to him. It is 



IF I WERE GOD 77 

impossible for the human mind to imagine anything 
that does not already exist in some form. Picture as 
grotesque an animal as you please, you will still have 
to give it limbs, mouth, teeth, and eyes, or some of 
them; you may multiply the quantity but you cannot 
invent an organ for it the like of which has never 
been seen or heard of before. The telephone and 
the wireless telegraph were hidden in earth and air 
when Abraham marched to the rescue of Lot across 
the plains of Mesopotamia millenniums ago, but he 
did not know it and so could not advise his kinsman 
of his coming in the way a British force on the 
same spot is doing to-day. Moses crossing the Red 
Sea used no aeroplane to reconnoitre Pharaoh's host, 
nor had he ever heard of the submarine, but they 
were there all right if he had only known how to 
summon them forth. No, man is not as God in re- 
lation to existence as a whole or in part. We have 
to reason from the known to the unknown : God does 
not. Our reason works within certain definite, 
sharply defined conditions: it cannot be supposed 
that God's does. As Henri Bergson tells us, the 
human mind is a by no means perfect instrument for 
enabling us to find our way about and do the best 
we can in a three-dimensional world, a world of up 
and down and to and fro, a world of material objects, 
of weight and gravitation, and dinners and teas, and 
clothes and houses, and cold and hot, and wet and 
dry, and all such like. Suppose a world of fifty 



78 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

dimensions — as there very well may be — or a 
world where none of these conditions held good at 
all, what then? But still it would be God's world, 
and His knowledge and power would pervade and 
control it as now. Clearly, when we talk of any 
likeness between man and God we must make large 
allowances. 

Let me point out that I am taking nothing for 
granted so far. I am not on my own ipse dixit dog- 
matically declaring that there is a God. I only say 
that if there be — and it is really undeniable in the 
last resort — He cannot be conditioned as we are, 
and therefore His ways of behaving must be to a 
large extent incomprehensible to us. Even the terms 
" He," " His," " Him " as applied to deity are apt 
to become somewhat misleading. They at once call 
up the idea of a person of the male sex, like ourselves 
but greater, wiser, better perhaps. Let us get that 
out of our heads. God is neither male nor female, 
and none of the other human qualities that depend 
upon earthly relationships can be exactly predicated 
of Him. If I had a better pronoun wherewith to 
designate the divine being I would use it, but it is 
part of our limitations that we have none. We can- 
not call Him " It," for that suggests something less 
than human, not something more; and God must be 
more, infinitely more, than the greatest we have yet 
known as man; for surely we have nothing that has 
not come from Him ; how could we have ? I think 



IF I WERE GOD 79 

I could get on common ground with the most pro- 
nounced agnostic, as well as the most assiduous 
churchgoer, by insisting on what I have said already : 
God is that, whatever it is, and it is far beyond the 
power of our intelligence and imagination to grasp, 
whence all that is proceeds directly or indirectly, ex- 
cept where our own wills come into play. He is 
the eternal force that brings into existence and main- 
tains the universe and everything in it. Hence He 
must be the source of everything in ourselves which 
we are accustomed to look upon as admirable — 
good, beautiful, sublime. Can we get away from 
that? I do not see how. In so far, then, as we find 
anything fine and worthy of reverence in human na- 
ture we are justified in affirming that that same 
thing is in God. 

These considerations are suggested to me by 
remarks that have reached me concerning what I 
have previously written in these pages. They have 
not all reached me by post; some of them, and these 
not the least piquant, have been addressed to me 
orally by our soldiers who have been reading the 
trench edition of the Sunday Herald, But all the 
interrogations put together only amount to this: 
If God is good as man is good, or as man thinks of 
good, why does He permit evils to fall upon us from 
which we should do our best to shield our children? 
If I were God would I do it? " There cannot be a 
God," cried a French essayist, " for if there were the 



80 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

woes of humanity would break his heart." Are you 
sure of that? What if God knows, as we cannot 
know, that the woes of humanity are but as the 
troubles of childhood? The troubles of childhood 
are real enough to children, but what do their elders 
think of them? It is all a matter of perspective. I 
can remember, as I daresay everybody can, that the 
griefs and fears of my childhood's days were as in- 
tense and poignant in their way as anything I have 
endured since, but they would not seem very serious 
to me now; they did not seem very serious to my 
preceptors then, though no doubt I had their kindly 
sympathy in bearing them. They knew, as I could 
not know, that it was not so very important to save 
me from them but highly important that I should 
come through them rightly. My playmates would 
have saved me from them, perhaps, or those who 
cared most for me would; but as a rule they could 
not. They took my point of view and mourned their 
impotence. To them it really did matter a great 
deal that I had lost my biggest glass alley or seen my 
favourite puppy drown or been forbidden to go to 
the school treat or been bowled for a duck in the 
cricket match. They knew all about the quarrel- 
lings and makings-up again which constituted school 
politics, the smart of injustice at the hands of ruth- 
less grown-ups, the humiliation and dismay of being 
plucked in exams or given the cold shoulder by those 
whose favour one most ardently desired to win. 



IF I WERE GOD 81 

But that was because they took my point of view; 
no adult either could or would, or if through sheer 
kindliness of heart one here and there pretended to 
they did it in such a way as to show me that they 
did not regard it in the same tragic light as I did. 
Is not this the clue to the matter that puzzles so 
many people just now? Would we treat our chil- 
dren thus? we cry, when tragedy dark and dreadful 
invades our little world. No, we should not, any 
more than one child would ordinarily condemn an- 
other to the experiences that to the childish mind are 
irksome and grievous. If I were God, would I al- 
low mankind either to inflict or endure anguish as it 
is doing to-day on such a colossal scale? If I were 
God, would there be all this cruel welter of blood 
and tears? With the immortal Omar we protest — 

"Ah, Love, could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire; 
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then 
Remould it nearer to .the heart's desire?" 

If I were God, would human folly and wickedness 
be permitted to fill the earth with horror and flame, 
to breed misery and injustice, to crush and trample 
upon the weak and innocent ? Yes, if you were God. 
That is just the point: You are not God. If you 
were you would view the struggle and the pain " with 
larger other eyes," as Tennyson affirms that even the 
angels do or our sainted dead. You are not God, 
nor are you yet of the great cloud of witnesses who 



82 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

compass us about from the side of heaven; you are 
only a child at school, and with the eyes of a child 
you gaze upon this death in life, beholding not what 
lies beyond, and perceiving little of the reason why 
things are as they are in the sombre arena where 

"Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn." 

Let no one ask this question any more; it is a 
childish question though it springs from a good im- 
pulse. All that is good in us is of God; it must be; 
where else could it come from? You cannot get 
more out of the universe than is already in it some- 
where. Is the stream of human tenderness likely 
to be purer than its fountain? That is the way some 
people talk, but it is pathetically silly; the very heart 
with which you protest against the ills of life is 
the product of the source of life. To the riddle of 
existence 

"I have no answer for myself or thee, 
Save that I learned beside my mother's knee: 
All is of God that is and is to be, 
And God is good. Let this suffice us still, 
Resting in childlike trust upon His will 
Who moves to His great ends unthwarted by the ill." 

There is comfort in this and inspiration too. But, 
some one will object, if the good is of God so is the 
bad; we have no more right to say He is good be- 
cause there is goodness in the world than that He 
is bad because there is badness in the world. No? 
Is that the way you reckon with your friends ? You 



IF I WERE GOD 83 

do not expect the same man to be true and a liar, 
tender and brutal, faithful and treacherous. If your 
best friend is accused of dishonourable conduct, no 
matter how black the evidence may be, you refuse to 
credit it. You say, I know him to be of strict in- 
tegrity; therefore I wait in confidence for the matter 
to be cleared up. Quite right: God cannot be the 
gentle heroism of Edith Cavell and the vile devilry 
of Von Bissing. That the one derives from Him 
renders it impossible that He could be the other. 
He could not be both Christ and Pilate. 

The other night a soldier thus addressed me pub- 
licly: " Sir, somebody has been saying in England 
that a man who dies for his country goes straight to 
heaven whatever his life may have been beforehand. 
Do you think it is true that if a chap has been a bit 
rackety, and yet gives his life in this way, he will be 
all right on the other side, or will he have to go to 
hell? " Do not smile, reader, at the naive simplicity 
of the question; I thought I detected a certain wist- 
fulness behind it, and it had evidently been widely 
discussed among the men who heard it put. I re- 
plied, " Probably the issue is not quite so sharp as 
you make it; few of us are fit either for highest 
heaven or deepest hell. But what would you do if 
you were God? " " I think I should give a fellow a 
chance," was the instant response. Need more be 
said? 



CHAPTER X 

THE CHURCHES AND UNIVERSAL' PEACE. 
A GENERAL COUNCIL 

Not long after the war commenced I made a sug- 
gestion from the City Temple pulpit which was 
widely, though for the most part inaccurately, quoted 
by the Press of this and other countries. Or per- 
haps it would be truer to say that the quotations 
were not so much inaccurate as inadequate because 
without their context, and also because of mistaken 
deductions from them. Merely to take a few sen- 
tences out of a lengthy discourse and print them as 
summing up a whole argument is seldom satisfactory. 
Certainly it was not so in this instance. The para- 
graph as a whole was somewhat as follows — 

Would it not be possible for the Christian forces 
of the world to combine after the conclusion of peace 
for the one purpose of preventing a recurrence of 
this horrible strife? If we could not unite upon 
anything else, surely we might unite upon this one 
practical object. I would even suggest that the 
Pope, as the head of the largest Christian com- 
munion, should be induced to take the initiative in 
the matter and call Protestants to his councils in 

84 



CHURCHES AND PEACE 85 

connection therewith. At any rate such action 
should be taken in concert with all the Christian 
churches of the world, however designated. Prot- 
estantism generally would support it, would be mor- 
ally bound to do so. And no one but the Pope could 
do it effectively, for the reason just given — namely, 
that he is the head of the largest and most interna- 
tional organisation of those who profess and call 
themselves Christians. The Metropolitan of the 
great Eastern Church — or, rather, of that great 
branch out of the four or five belonging to it in which 
the people of Russia are included — could not do 
it. The Archbishop of Canterbury for obvious rea- 
sons could not do it; he is the spiritual head of 
Anglicanism only, and Rome would not respond to 
an invitation issued from that quarter. What is 
wanted is something analogous to a General Council 
of the whole undivided Church of Christ — not a 
General Council in the ordinary sense, of course, be- 
cause not directly concerned with questions of faith 
and morals — but it would be a wonderfully impres- 
sive gathering all the same, and no doubt lead to even 
greater things — the ultimate re-union of Christen- 
dom, for instance. The Pope is the proper person 
to summon such an assembly. And there is a prece- 
dent for it in the Council of Trent, to which Prot- 
estant delegates were invited but refused to come. 
Had their response been favourable instead of un- 
favourable, who knows what strife and anguish Eu- 



86 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

rope might have been saved in the last three hundred 
years? 

These were not the actual words I used; I cannot 
recall them now; but they represent the gist of them. 
One reason why I refer to them again is that I find 
they are still being quoted. They are coming back 
to me, or comments upon them are, from the ends of 
the earth, both by letter and the printed page. And 
they are generally misunderstood, not only by those 
who disapprove of them but by those who hail them 
with satisfaction. The Glasgow Herald, for ex- 
ample, one of the most influential newspapers in 
Great Britain, construed them as an appeal to the 
Pope to stop the war, made them the text of an in- 
dictment of peace-mongers in general, and went on 
gravely to warn the public against all the misguided 
individuals who advocated the laying down of arms 
before German militarism had been smashed. Such 
talk, the leader-writer declared, was not only futile 
but mischievous, as it only served to encourage the 
enemy by leading him to believe that certain elements 
in this country were in favour of peace at any price. 
I quite agree with him, only he was lecturing the 
wrong man. On the other hand, to my utter sur- 
prise, eminent leaders of thought in the churches and 
elsewhere gave warm support to the suggestion, or 
what they imagined to be the suggestion. I should 
have thought they would have scouted it as too 



CHURCHES AND PEACE 87 

friendly to the Scarlet Woman. But they did not. 
Anti-papal prejudice scarcely appeared at all in their 
utterances, being overshadowed by the purely hu- 
manitarian aspect of the case. " If the Pope or 
anybody else can put an end to all this bloodshed 
and misery," said one Free Church leader, " for 
God's sake let him have a try." 

But I never said he could; nor did I say a word 
about laying down our arms before Germany was 
beaten. I was not speaking of putting a stop to 
the present war but of what ought to follow when it 
did stop. Most people agree that we should be wise 
to think about that, though it is doubtful if we shall 
to any good effect; the conclusion of peace may find 
us unprepared for the future as usual. I know that 
it is quite useless to desire any mediation with Ger- 
many until she knows her power is broken. Nobody 
needs to tell us that. If I had had any idea before- 
hand that words spoken from a pulpit in the course 
of an ordinary sermon were likely to be taken up in 
the Press I should have been more careful to define 
my meaning. The meaning was clear enough to 
those who heard them in the first place. 

The moment is not unsuitable for returning to the 
idea and pressing it. The chief thing against it is 
that in the interval indignation has mounted amongst 
the allies at the Pope's silence regarding the fate of 
Belgium. But that should not be allowed to affect 
the main issue, which is whether organised Christian- 



88 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ity is strong enough to make its mind felt and have 
its decrees enforced in regard to the most crying 
moral need of the age. The Hague tribunal is very 
largely a failure, a sad disillusionment for advocates 
of international amity, and we need something better 
and ought to get it if we can. It is not as complete 
a failure as it looks, perhaps; it has done a great 
deal more than is popularly realised; but the way in 
which its solemn agreements have been summarily 
swept aside by the various combatants in this fright- 
ful struggle is a demonstration of its helplessness to 
control the jealousies and antagonisms of nations. 
Germany cynically disregarded its requirements from 
the first, and more or less the belligerents opposed 
to her had to follow suit. Poison gas, for instance, 
was no afterthought; it was a deliberate policy 
secretly prepared for long before the war. In order 
to take her neighbours at a disadvantage Germany 
gave her plighted word along with them not to resort 
to this fiendish device, and forthwith set to work to 
experiment with one gas after another in view of 
the conflict she meant to provoke as soon as it suited 
her. This is all in keeping with her customary 
methods. She had no objection to signing as many 
Hague regulations as we pleased, but she had no 
intention of keeping them; they did not bind her for 
five minutes; it is not now only that she has broken 
them, but all along, ever since the ink was wet on 
the paper which bore her solemn pledge. 



CHURCHES AND PEACE 89 

This is a revelation, and one wonders why an in- 
ternational tribunal could thus easily be set at nought, 
treated with contempt, in fact. In Germany's hands 
it has simply been a means of throwing dust in the 
eyes of possible enemies. Is it not because the 
Hague Court is without true moral authority? It 
should not be forgotten that we owe its establish- 
ment to the Czar, and that without doubt it was an 
honest and sincere attempt on his part to get rid of 
the spectre of militarism and the ever-accelerating 
competition in armaments with its inevitable out- 
come, to prevent the very thing that has now hap- 
pened and plunged the whole world in woe. We all 
remember the joy with which the effort was uni- 
versally hailed and how much was expected from it 
— Germany, as usual, being the only dark horse, or 
rather the only power unwilling to co-operate whole- 
heartedly in the endeavour to secure universal peace. 
That, of course, was because she did not intend to 
have peace; she intended to have war. And yet it 
was the Czar who went to war first. The Russo- 
Japanese disagreement came to a head almost as 
soon as the Hague Conference began its sittings. It 
was a sad commentary on the hopes of its promoters. 
The Czar's motives were all right, but a purely legal 
tribunal, established by bargaining on utilitarian 
grounds, and fortified by no common faith in God 
and righteousness, was not likely to succeed. We 
must go further and higher for the cure of our ills. 



9 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Not many people realise, I think, that Europe was 
once a unity — civilisation was a unity — in a way 
it is not now. We have lost something very valu- 
able in the last few hundred years that we urgently 
need to regain in this respect. I mean the unity 
which centered in the Catholic Church. At a time 
when all Europe was a congeries of ill-organised, 
constantly quarrelling States — though not one whit 
worse than now, when internal organisation has de- 
veloped only at the cost of making warfare in general 
more deadly and terrible — there was one visible 
seat of moral authority to which all men looked, one 
mighty throne before which all secular potentates 
bowed down, and that was the See of St. Peter. It 
has been called the most magnificent failure in his- 
tory, and with justice, this attempt to impose the law 
of God by word of mouth only upon all the ends of 
the earth. It was wonderful beyond words. Eu- 
rope was one in virtue of that authority and that 
alone, felt and knew itself to be one it has never 
done since and never will till we recover something 
like it. Would that it had never been abused! It 
failed because it deserved to fail; it failed when it 
became itself only one political power among many 
and forfeited its prerogative of lofty disinterested- 
ness. Let us get that unity back, and along similar 
but safer lines. I am not advocating a return to ap- 
peals to the Pope, and all that sort of thing; not 
suggesting a resumption of his jurisdiction over the 



CHURCHES AND PEACE 91 

internal affairs of this country or any other country ; 
not asking that he as an individual or the holder of 
an exalted office should do anything whatever on 
his ipse dixit alone. What I am pressing for is a 
unity of action on the part of the Christian 
Churches through him which will result in something 
like a restoration on better terms of the international 
unity of nearly a thousand years ago. 

Back to what we began with — Is it impossible to 
hope for a high-souled concentration of the energies 
of Christendom upon the design of putting an end to 
warfare between civilised states? When the pres- 
ent devastating struggle is over shall we not all be 
in the mood to listen to some such proposal? Mr. 
Asquith almost said as much in his Guildhall speech 
in the autumn of 19 14. He held out the prospect 
of a solemn agreement of the nations to forbid the 
drawing of the sword again between any of their 
number coming within the pale of International Law. 
If serious and responsible statesmanship could say as 
much as this at the outset of the most appalling war 
that has ever been waged, what about the Christian 
ideal of universal peace? Is it only a dream, after 
all; a far distant glimmer of hope for the race? I 
have given to the Premier's words what I take to 
be a legitimate extension of their immediate scope. 
A pact of the nations ! How is it to be brought 
about? Broadly speaking, the nations coming 
within the pale of International Law are the so- 



92 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

called Christian nations. Japan was not included 
until a few years back. Cannot we utilise the tre- 
mendous force involved in the Christian sentiment of 
these nations to put a stop for ever to the use of 
brute force, so wasteful, wanton and wicked, in the 
settlement of international disputes and the prose- 
cution of international rivalries? To be sure we 
can if we want to. And the Pope is the most fitting 
personage to take the lead in virtue of the peculiar 
position he holds in the western world. When I 
referred to the precedent of the Council of Trent 
I was not taking too much for granted. The sepa- 
ration between Protestantism and Catholicism had 
not become absolute by the middle of the sixteenth 
century. Protestantism up to then had been simply 
what the name implies, a protest against certain 
things within the Catholic system; it was not at first 
intended as a complete break-off from that system. 
Right on into the next century reconciliation was 
sought and aimed at. It was a fierce age too. 
When safe-conducts were offered to the Protestant 
delegates in order that they might attend the Council 
they were certainly justified in fearing a breach of 
faith, with imprisonment and death as their portion, 
if they were unwary enough to place themselves in 
the power of their ecclesiastical adversaries. Any- 
how, they did not go. But my point is that they 
were invited, and invited to the most important 
General Council of the Church since primitive times. 



CHURCHES AND PEACE 93 

Why not invite them again, not to a General Council, 
but to something even more comprehensive, con- 
voked on a specific issue ? Could the Pope be got to 
do it as soon as the war is over? No one could 
charge him with pro-Germanism then, and it would 
not matter a button if they did. His personal opin- 
ions would not be in question. What the assembly 
would be expected to do would be to place on record 
its abhorrence of war between Christian powers and 
to pledge itself to bring all reasonable pressure to 
bear upon civilised governments and peoples to 
render a world conflict like the present impossible 
for all time to come. We should have had our les- 
son by then and be more than disposed to listen to the 
appeal. There is not a Church in Christendom that 
would not join in it through its appointed repre- 
sentatives. And the vast conference thus convened 
would not end in smoke. As the outcome of it there 
might be a tribunal established more authoritative 
and effective than that of the Hague, to say no more. 
Perhaps we should get even further than that in, 
shall we say, the direction of adjusting our religious 
differences too, and unifying civilisation once more 
on that basis. 

Why not? The like has been done before — not 
so thoroughly, perhaps, but to a large extent. We 
owe the mitigation of the horrors of modern warfare 
to it. It was Church Councils in the tenth century 
that forbade the spoliation and maltreatment of non- 



94 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

combatants; and who has not heard of the Truce of 
God throughout the Middle Ages whereby hostilities 
were limited to what was practically about three 
months in the year; there was to be no fighting from 
Wednesday evening to Monday morning in any one 
week, and there were special seasons, such as Lent, 
when there was to be none at all. Think of that 
to-day! We have lost in some ways if we have 
gained in others by our boasted material advance in 
the past few generations. 

When I was in Rome, in the early spring of 19 14, 
I discussed the above subject with a highly placed 
dignitary of the Papal court and found him not un- 
sympathetic but more than doubtful of success until 
a big war had taken place. He might have foreseen 
what was coming, so truly did he describe the ter- 
rible situation in which we find ourselves at this mo- 
ment. " Governments would not listen to any such 
representation, " he said, " even if backed by the 
suffrages of all the Christian societies on earth, until 
the arbitrament of brute force has been tried once 
more. They have not been piling up armaments all 
these years for nothing, and the explosion must soon 
come. Moreover," he added, " this is the outcome 
of the false ideals by which the nations have been 
living. Politics are non-moral; conscience is left out 
of them. The very men who in their private lives 
are amiable and exemplary will, the moment they 
enter the office from which they exercise their func- 



CHURCHES AND PEACE 95 

tions as statesmen, divest themselves of all scruples 
and behave without consideration for anything but 
the material interests of the particular country they 
happen to serve. It is all very sordid and very 
grievous; and there is a period of great tribulation 
ahead of us. After that, perhaps something may be 
done on the lines you suggest. The Holy Father 
would take the first opportunity he could find if he 
saw any good likely to come of it." 

I was sorry to hear his final word. " There could 
be no committee," he declared. " If the Pope acted 
at all he would act as head of the Catholic Church 
and that only; but there is no reason why what he 
was about to do should not be made known un- 
officially to the chief authorities of the various his- 
toric Protestant sects and let them be in readiness 
to support it. Action would then be simultaneous 
when it came, and do all you want." 

No, it would not. We want something better 
than that. We want the deliberate and sustained 
co-operation of all who count themselves followers 
of the Prince of Peace. Shall we ever get it? 



CHAPTER XI 

THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 

Pythagoras said, " There is no being but becom- 
ing." The statement is a paradox, but ordinary ex- 
perience goes far towards justifying it. One does 
not need to be a metaphysician in order to realise 
that life is ever in progress of development. We 
are ever looking forward, ever seeking a goal; the 
zest of life is in anticipation. 

" Man never is, but always to be blest." 

No sooner have we arrived at any point at which 
our endeavours have aimed than we instantly look 
beyond it and find a new focus for desire. Somehow 
we cannot stand still, cannot be content, cannot rest 
in present attainment. We may say we do, but we 
don't. There is no person so passive and listless in 
relation to his environment that he does not try in 
some degree to improve it if only to shift from one 
side of the fire to the other; he is never completely 
satisfied for long. It he loses interest in the future, 
or despairs of it, he is already in the way of death. 
With the ordinary healthy-minded member of society 
to live is to hope, dream, plan and execute. One 
always has something to do which one believes will 

96 



THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 97 

tend towards betterment, some object to be gained, 
some end to be achieved; and as long as that goes 
on one is truly alive — this is living. Is there any 
reader among those to whom these words come who 
is not at least trying to secure something for himself 
or other people which he thinks will be an advantage ? 
Not one, I should think. We are all trying, trying 
in little ways and big ways, to make conditions bet- 
ter than we found them or they found us, to make 
to-morrow better than yesterday. 

And there is more than a touch of illusion about it 
too. You scheme and toil for years in the expecta- 
tion that once a certain success has been won you 
will thenceforth be able to take things more easily or 
sail your barque in calmer waters or be freed from 
the necessity of such energising again. If I could 
only turn that corner, you say, or obtain this situ- 
ation, or have done with the restrictions that have 
hampered me so long, I should be all right. Does 
it ever turn out so? Not in the sense you pictured 
it, I warrant. You simply go straight on. There 
is another corner to be turned just ahead, another 
position to strive after, a fresh set of hindrances to 
be battled with and overcome. I do not say there 
is no gain accruing from the struggle. I only say 
that the very same effort has to be made, the very 
same strain undergone, but with a new objective. 

Furthermore, we are all intent upon making some- 
thing. Man loves to create; it is instinctive with 



98 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

him. Put him down on a desert island and he will 
instantly set to work to bring into existence some ob- 
ject of beauty or utility which was not there before. 
I admit that he does not really create ; he only com- 
bines and adjusts in terms of nature's laws; but he 
has the creative idea, and gives expression to it as 
nature affords him opportunity and supplies material. 
And in this he finds his happiness. It is a joy to 
build and increase, to subdue natural forces to 
rational ends; there is no joy to equal it except that 
of loving and being loved, and even that has a good 
deal of the other in it; the two are intertwined. 
Always we are reaching out towards betterment, 
striving to produce it, and the main impulse so to do 
is a social one. 

Moreover, the best kind of work, the one that 
gives the fullest satisfaction to the worker, is always 
impersonal in motive. You have only to interrogate 
your own experience to find that this is so. If you 
succeed in inventing a machine that no other mind 
has ever thought of, your principal delight consists in 
the fact that it is of universal utility; it belongs to 
the race, not to yourself alone. You would have no 
pleasure in it whatever if you knew for certain that 
nobody would profit by it but yourself. You may 
be keen and eager for fame and wealth on account 
of it, but nothing is more certain in this world than 
that you would lose all interest in your own achieve- 
ment the moment it proved to be worthless to man- 



THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 99 

kind. At the back of everything worth doing, no 
matter what, is this feeling that the whole race 
benefits by it, and not the individual only — not the 
doer only, anyhow. You may be selfish and grasp- 
ing to an extreme degree, calculating, commercial, 
but you cannot get any good for yourself out of your 
creations unless you can feel assured that they belong 
more to the community than they do to you, more 
to posterity than to the present, are helping to enrich 
the common life, adding somewhat to the constantly 
mounting total of humanity's gains. You may not 
keep much consciousness of this in what you are 
doing; you may be so completely absorbed in your 
task as a task as to be oblivious of its bearing on the 
future ; but the fact is there all the same at the back 
of all your striving, and gives it meaning and value. 
Has any artist ever yet painted a masterpiece that 
was not for other eyes than his own? Did he want 
it to perish along with himself? In a sense the 
whole race produced that picture as an expression 
of its soul, and for the whole race it lives. What 
poet ever sung save to and for his kind at large? 
True, he could not help himself. As Tennyson 
avowed — 

" I do but sing because I must, 
And pipe but as the linnets sing." 

Nevertheless every soul that breathes is present 
impersonally in every song that gushes from a poet's 
heart. 



ioo THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

All our activities operate between two poles: 
self-ism and other-ism. Perhaps the two are not 
ultimately inconsistent. You cannot realise your- 
self without serving the whole. Stark egoism, if 
it could exist anywhere, which I doubt, would de- 
stroy itself. In self-giving is self-gaining. And 
what a curious thing it is that the impulse to self- 
giving should be so mighty, notwithstanding all the 
objections of prudent self-interest. I verily believe 
those psychologists are right who maintain that the 
strongest instinct of human nature, after all, is that 
of self-immolation, the peculiar exalted joy that 
comes of flinging all one is and has into the common 
stook when some tremendous demand is made upon 
our uttermost in an hour of crisis. I question 
whether there is a single man in the whole range of 
my acquaintance or anybody else's who would re- 
main absolutely unmoved by an appeal to that in 
him, whatever it is, that makes the individual willing 
to die that others may live or some great cause pre- 
vail. I have never come across one and never expect 
to. Base men I have met, not a few, and suffered 
from them — mean men, cowardly men, men with 
shrivelled, sordid souls; but I am as certain as I live 
that these same men, placed in circumstances of dire 
need, such as the siege of a great city or the sinking 
of a ship at sea, with all that such a tragedy would 
mean for the weak and helpless, and appealed to at 
the right moment — for that is important — or 



THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 101 

fired by noble example, would rise to the full height 
of their manhood and behave like heroes. They 
may not live like heroes, but that is another matter. 
There is something deep down in every one of us 
that compels us, once it can be awakened, to count 
not our lives dear unto us, in fact to find an austere 
joy in walking straight into the arms of death if an 
occasion arises big enough to demand the sacrifice. 
Men have done this for generations unborn, are do- 
ing it to-day. The lonely lot of the pioneer has 
often been cheered by that realisation when no other 
comfort was left. Thus brooded Theodore 
Parker — 

"I see before 
My race an age or so; and I am sent 
For the stern work to hew a path among 
The thorns — I take them in my flesh — to tread 
With naked feet, the road, and smooth it o'er 
With blood. Well, I shall lay my bones 
In some sharp crevice of the broken way. 
Men shall in better times stand where I fell, 
And journey singing on in perfect bands, 
Where I have trod alone." 

This thought of ministering to human progress 
by what one does and suffers in the present has in 
it an element of the sublime. We recognise in it an 
intrinsic greatness. But is it enough, taken by it- 
self, to justify the cost it generally exacts? I am 
sure it is not. It either implies the eternal or it is 
the greatest of delusions. We of the modern world 
have been obsessed by the notion of progress as an 
incentive to action, and, as I have shown, there is 



102 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

a noble ingredient in the conception such as it is. 
But a progress which looks no farther than the per- 
fecting of human society on this earth at some long 
distant date, supposing such a thing to be possible, 
which it is not, is an utterly inadequate ideal for man 
or nation. No civilisation worth fighting for will 
ever be made by it or ever has been. It is difficult 
to imagine the difference in this respect between 
ancient and modern thought. The ancients did not 
believe in progress at all, rather in reaction and de- 
cadence or a static condition of things waiting for 
an inevitable end. The Greeks of the classic age 
are commonly supposed to have been a joyous folk, 
full of eager interest in the world as it is and valu- 
ing it for its own sake; to them mundane existence 
was ever full of smiling beauty. Was it? There 
is no sadder testimony to the contrary in all litera- 
ture than is supplied by the Greek tragedies and 
Greek philosophy generally. The less said about 
their morality, perhaps, the better, but their religion 
had a note of hopelessness in it which was all too 
faithfully reflected in the maxims of their daily life. 
They dreaded to die because of the gloom of Hades, 
the abode of the dead, as they pictured it; but they 
never talked of living for any golden morrow as we 
do. As for the great oriental empires of the past, 
just as now, whenever the individual did become 
articulate therein his note was one of mournful resig- 
nation. No Jew ever looked forward to making 



THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 103 

the world gradually better; the best he could antici- 
pate was that God would one day intervene sud- 
denly to drive all the evil out of it with a strong hand. 
Christian civilisation was not greatly different for 
centuries. It brought glad tidings of great joy, but 
they had nothing to do with progress in the modern 
sense of the word. Christianity despaired of the 
world — never let us forget that. It expected little 
from it at the best, and much evil at the worst. It 
looked forward, not to the gradual emergence of a 
better ordered human society in which every one 
should be happy as a matter of course, but to a day 
when Christ should come again with power to put 
an end all at once and for ever to human disabilities, 
or at least to those of the saints; it was to be other- 
wise with the sinners. All these people of old 
looked back, not forward, back to a better state of 
things which they imagined to have once existed and 
from which humanity had culpably and foolishly 
declined. They never dreamed of such a thing as 
going on, steadily advancing with the aid of science 
from one achievement to another, till all human ills 
had been conquered save death, and even he should 
be postponed. That is the way we talk — or did 
before the war. Perhaps we are wiser now. Mr. 
C. G. Coulton, in his interesting study, From St. 
Francis to Dante, states that one of the most striking 
features of thirteenth-century mentality was its pes- 
simism. That is surprising; we are accustomed to 



104 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

think the exact opposite. We have thought of this 
as a violent but picturesque period, subject to ex- 
tremes, naive and childlike in its outlook on life, full 
of religious fervour and zeal, vigorous and unafraid. 
And here we are told that it was nothing of the sort ! 
Mr. Coulton says it was always looking for the end, 
convinced that things were going from bad to worse, 
and that human wickedness and misery could not 
be divinely tolerated much longer. 

What ground is there for believing that human 
affairs must inevitably progress towards betterment? 
None whatever. History almost demonstrates the 
contrary. There is nothing in our civilisation to 
guarantee its permanence more than any of its prede- 
cessors. It might completely collapse, as did the 
wonderful Graece-Roman civilisation upon whose 
ruins ours arose. In fact, there are plenty of signs 
of such a catastrophe already. We have not solved 
the problem of living in mutual dignity, harmony 
and peace; we have no clear object before us as in- 
dividuals or states, unless it be that of the ceaseless 
accumulation of material good; we are only partially 
socialised as yet; and, finally, all governments are 
more or less mad. Progress on the whole there may 
be, but it is like that of the incoming tide on a level 
sandy beach. The waves may seem to be coming 
in fast, but they run back as well as forward, and 
progress is slow. A long arm of water will creep 
inland here and there far in advance of the rest and 



THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 105 

too shallow to carry fishing craft. It reaches a cer- 
tain point, and then waits till reinforced from an en- 
tirely different side. 

" For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main." 

To talk of progress as sufficient in itself as a dyna- 
mic to human devotion and enterprise is like saying 
that it is worth setting a prairie on fire in order that 
possibly some people a thousand miles off in the 
direction the wind is blowing may be able to cook 
their evening meal. Is all the agony and bloody 
sweat of mankind since the beginning of time to have 
none other outcome than that? I repeat that, even 
supposing you could get a perfected form of human 
society on this earth in some remote age to come — 
which the very conditions of fleshly existence forbid 
— it would not be worth a single tear to-day. The 
humblest private who lays down his life on the battle- 
field for us is worth more than that in himself alone. 
And he dies for more than that, even if to his own 
thought he only dies for England, the England that 
is to be. He dies for an immortal good, a good in 
which he, with all the race, past, present, and to 
come, will be included and fulfilled at " the consum- 
mation of all things." 



CHAPTER XII 

RELIGION AFTER THE WAR: WILL CHRISTIANITY 
SURVIVE ? 

One subject upon which a great deal is being said 
and written at the present time is the relation of the 
Christian Church to the war and the new conditions 
created by the war. On the one hand we are told 
that the war itself proves the failure of Christianity, 
and on the other that it has already led to something 
like a religious revival. Critics of the churches 
storm at them for having so little comfort or guid- 
ance to give in a time of such prodigious upheaval as 
this, and at the same time we are receiving over- 
whelming testimony to the devotion of the chaplains 
at the front and the amazing activities of religious 
organisations in general in providing for the spir- 
itual needs of the troops; nothing of the kind has 
ever been attempted so thoroughly and systematically 
before; it is as much a new creation as our vast 
armies themselves. But what many people are ask- 
ing is whether it will continue and in what form. 
How will religion come out of the struggle? Will 
Christendom repudiate its ancient faith or not? 
Will civilisation in the future, or what is left of it, 
want to have anything to do with Jesus Christ or the 

106 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 107 

Church that professes to speak in His name? Here 
is a composite question which we ought to be facing 
now and have some definite answer ready. 

It may be as well to say, in the first place, that 
this is a challenge addressed not so much to us as 
to our Lord. This should not be forgotten in any 
searchings of heart or confession of our own short- 
comings which we may undertake. Christians, and 
especially the clergy, may be greatly to blame for 
much that the critics complain of or they may not, 
but the fact remains that if the Church of Christ 
can perish from the earth, as some even among its 
own adherents are fearing, the result will be the 
failure less of Christians than of Christ. He prom- 
ised that the gates of hell should not prevail against 
it, and so far that promise has been kept, kept 
through periods much more menacing and deadly so 
far as the spiritual well-being of mankind was con- 
cerned than now. Would anybody affirm that the 
Europe ecclesiastically governed by the Renaissance 
popes, for instance, was in a better state than the 
present; or that religion in the western world in the 
dark and troublous tenth century, when human so- 
ciety seemed on the verge of collapsing altogether, 
gave hope of a better morrow than ours? Yet the 
Church recovered herself then, and why should we 
doubt her ability to do so still? There is absolutely 
no comparison in the mortal status of the ministry to- 
day as viewed against that of either of these epochs, 



108 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

not to speak of the Georgian era in England alone, 
when it was only too easily possible for a drunken 
reprobate to hold half a dozen livings at once and the 
king make the cynical remark that half his bishops 
were atheists. The Methodist revival, the Evan- 
gelical movement, and the Tractarian movement have 
all had their effect in raising the quality of those who 
follow the most sacred of all callings in our country, 
and different causes have operated in the same di- 
rection at intervals in other countries. With all 
their faults, and they have been many and grievous, 
this can honestly be said of the monastic orders, and 
the Friars and Jesuits each in their generation and 
degree ; they all breathed new life into the dry bones 
of the regular ministry as they successively came on 
the scene. The Church has often failed locally but 
never universally. She has disappeared entirely 
from certain parts of the world where she had estab- 
lished a footing for a time, and she has had the con- 
quest to make all over again as, most remarkably, 
in the case of China. The flame of spiritual fervour 
has again and again died down in Christendom as a 
whole, but has never gone out, and never will unless 
Christ Himself was wrong in His forecast of the 
future; and it is a great strength to any Christian 
worker to know that. After all, it does not princi- 
pally rest with us and our merits to keep the flag of 
the faith flying; it rests with Him who gave us the 
commission to go and make disciples of all nations. 



RELIGION AFTER JHE WAR 109 

By the " gates of hell " He must have meant the 
forces of evil in the world and perhaps in other 
worlds too. I take it that He was thinking of all 
that, seen or unseen, is fighting against the Kingdom 
of heaven. So here is one thing to be reckoned with 
at the outset of any inquiry as to the position and 
prospects of Christianity in this or any other age : 
our Blessed Lord and Master guaranteed that it 
should not fail. Let the discouraged and apprehen- 
sive lay hold on that. It can only be proved false 
when the human race rejects Jesus Christ, and that 
is not likely to happen. For, whatever may be said 
about His Church, it seems agreed to reverence Him. 
At the same time it must be admitted that there 
have been tendencies at work for the past generation 
or two which the war has brought to a head and 
which were and are directly and consciously opposed 
to Christianity as a system of belief and practice — I 
do not mean in regard to this or that doctrine or 
mode of worship or explanation of the cosmic scheme, 
but as a moral ideal, a rule of life desirable for men 
to follow and by which society should be ordered and 
governed. In this respect the latter part of the 
nineteenth century and the opening years of the 
twentieth have witnessed a return to the sub-apostolic 
age. When Christianity first began to be a power 
in the world it found itself up against the ideals of 
an ancient and elaborate civilisation, seemingly im- 
pregnable and rooted in human nature. The Chris- 



no THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

tians had a certain standard of conduct to proclaim 
and live which was treated with great scorn by the 
pagan philosophers and magistrates as being an ethic 
for women and slaves. The Stoic philosophy, whose 
finest but not most characteristic product was the 
noble Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was that which best 
interpreted the Roman genius, the genius of those 
marvellous soldiers who conquered the world. To 
tell a successful Roman general that he ought to love 
his enemies would have been tantamount to telling 
him that the Roman empire ought not to exist, and 
he would have treated the proposition with the most 
utter contempt. We take for granted nowadays that 
the Christian law of love is the highest whether we 
obey it or not, but the Roman thinker of eighteen or 
nineteen hundred years ago would not have done 
anything of the kind; he would have maintained that 
this was not a proper ideal to set before the mind 
of youth. Two moralities thus strove against each 
other, and in the end the Christian prevailed, though 
everything seemed against it. Let me emphasise 
the point : it was not a contest between what every- 
body saw to be right and everybody knew to be 
wrong, but between two inconsistent views of right 
and wrong. The new Christian ethic did emphasise 
the more feminine qualities in human nature, the 
gentle, self-effacing, tender and considerate in op- 
position to the more characteristically masculine, 
egoistic, overbearing. It took a long time before the 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR in 

issue was made clear, and when the victory came — 
for it did come — it built a new civilisation. Men 
have never fully obeyed the Christian rule of life, 
but the enormous, the incalculable gain made to hu- 
manity was the universal admission ultimately secured 
that this was right, this was the true ideal to aim at, 
and that everything inconsistent with it was wrong. 
We are still far from having worked it out in our 
social relations, which are largely influenced by sel- 
fish and therefore anti-Christian considerations, but 
at least we profess our belief in it, and that is a tre- 
mendous change from the time when it had to over- 
come and drive out another and widely different idea 
as to what was truly admirable and to be aimed at in 
character and conduct. 

But, as I have just said, for a good while past 
potent attempts have been made to overthrow the 
Christian ethic and substitute another for it on the 
ground that it is effete. The avowed object of 
Nietzsche and others who thought with him on this, 
however much they might disagree with him in other 
things, was to destroy Christianity as a false moral- 
ity — slave morality they called it. It is curious 
to note what a reversion to type this was. Nietzsche 
hated and despised Prussianism and yet was himself 
made by it, for there is not the slightest doubt that 
the Prussian spirit which has increasingly dominated 
the German people for the last forty years was partly 
created by and partly created the professors who 



ii2 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

have truculently preached it in the seminaries, and 
instilled it in season and out of season into the rising 
generation. History certainly does repeat itself in 
some ways, and this is one of them. The successful 
war of 1870 made the new-born German empire 
drunk with the lust of power. Its militaristic temper 
: — brutal, ruthless, domineering — was a recrudes- 
cence of that of old Rome, the Rome of the invincible 
war machine and the pagan philosophies; the sim- 
ilarity is rather striking; the main difference is that 
in modern Germany patriotism in the exclusive sense 
has become a passion to which everything else must 
be subordinated, whereas Rome, at least, aimed at 
the idea of a world-citizenship. Otherwise we have 
just the same worship of power and might, the same 
lust of domination, the same ruthlessness in attain- 
ing ends; and then, of course, in both cases we have 
the philosopher coming along to show that this hard, 
grim, bloody-minded monster that had its foot on the 
neck of the human race represented something 
stronger, greater, more desirable from the ethical 
point of view and every other point of view than 
what it was seeking to supersede. Morality, the 
professor assures us, as we have hitherto understood 
it is but a device of the weak to protect themselves 
against the strong; and he insists upon the necessity 
for a new morality, the morality of German Kultur 
and the mailed fist, the morality of the terrible 
" blonde beast." We have seen it at work in the 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 113 

last eighteen months and know its fruits. Here is 
its genesis — a triumphal war, a consequent State 
policy consistently carried out, and then the elevation 
of the cult of nationalism and brute violence into a 
religion. True, the name Christian is retained for it, 
but it is not Christianity at all; it is Paganism re- 
vived. If Germany were to win this war Chris- 
tianity would be trampled in the dust and anti-Christ 
enthroned. The slave-morality would have gone 
under, Nietzsche or no Nietzsche; his main conten- 
tion would be justified. 

Nevertheless we must admit that such a state of 
things could not have arisen without the co-operation 
of the rest of Christendom to some extent. We are 
all in it more or less. Ever since the marvellous and 
comparatively sudden forward leap of natural sci- 
ence in the nineteenth century, practically the whole 
civilised world has been feverishly busy exploiting 
our hitherto unknown material sources. There is 
no harm in that, to be sure, seen in its propel propor- 
tion, but, unfortunately, that is what has been lack- 
ing. Alfred Russel Wallace says that from the ma- 
terial point of view civilisation made more progress 
in the latter half of the nineteenth century than in the 
two thousand years preceding. What more likely 
than that men should come to be so preoccupied with 
considerations of material good as to forget for a 
time that there was any other kind of good? Peo- 
ple always tend to become like their pursuits, and the 



ii4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

practical materialism of the past fifty or sixty years 
has gradually developed a type of man who is, to 
use E. A. Abbott's term, " indisposed " towards re- 
ligion. He does not fight it, does not definitely re- 
ject it, he simply becomes indifferent to it; he has no 
use for it. This is not because he is cleverer than 
his forefathers, far otherwise; it is that he has de- 
veloped another kind of a mind, a mind that is taken 
up with the things of this world, that dwells mainly on 
the outside of life. It is not even that we have gone 
backwards in our moral standards nor that the vicious 
perversion of moral ideals which we have noted in 
the case of Germany has had very much vogue with 
us. Moral standards are always changing, or at 
least changing their stresses. The morality of one 
generation is not quite that of another; still less is 
the morality of one race that of another. It is a 
moot point, indeed, whether morality could not exist 
without religion. To have a human society at all 
we must have a morality of some sort; if every man 
were a law unto himself society would not hold to- 
gether. And in commercial countries like our own 
the virtues emphasised will naturally be those which 
tend to the increase and conservation of property, 
as being able to place reliance upon a man's word 
and the like. " Integrity " is a favourite excellence 
in the character of a successful industrial or com- 
mercial magnate. In other and less prosperous coun- 
tries, such as the southern districts of Europe, this 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 115 

is seldom so marked, and stay-at-home British Phil- 
istines are apt to be shocked when they hear that the 
Spaniard or Neapolitan has less regard for the truth 
than they and is quite without " integrity." It does 
not occur to them, perhaps, that their own integrity 
and truthfulness are consistent with a good deal of 
moral blindness in the matter of social justice. Per- 
haps a future generation will ask with amazement 
how it ever came to be thought that the possession 
of vast wealth and luxurious habits of living were 
consistent with a profession of Christianity while 
slums and rags remained. It has been truly said 
that the laws of England attribute more importance 
to offences against property than to those against the 
person, while in the Romance countries it is almost 
the reverse. If we could get outside our world al- 
together and view it from some totally different en- 
vironment we should see at once that we have long 
been so obsessed by materialistic conceptions as to 
have lost consciousness of the fact; we simply take for 
granted that the practical things of life are those 
which relate to material values, and the practical 
man the man of sound judgment upon material prob- 
lems, whereas, surely, it should be just the other way 
round. The truly practical man is the man who has 
some idea as to what life is for, and who knows that 
the pursuit of material objects as ends in themselves 
starves and enervates the soul. 

This is the real secret of the falling away in regard 



n6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

to religion which has been noticeable throughout 
Europe and America for such a long time. We have 
been growing a wrong type of mind, a type whose 
tendency is to think and feel in terms of material 
good and that alone, and to assume almost without 
question that the only real kind of good is that which 
directly or indirectly pertains to the body and its 
needs. There is not a pin to choose between the rich 
and the poor in this respect; the one has what the 
other wants, and that is about all. And it is this 
invincible prepossession which has made the war. 
The war is a clash of spiritual ideals, it is true, but 
if Germany had not been convinced that it was a 
thing supremely desirable to despoil other nations of 
their material possessions she would not have armed 
to do it, and we on our part would not have armed to 
resist her. How far we are right or wrong to re- 
sist her I will not now discuss. Suffice it to say with 
Mr. Norman Angell that there is nothing now to be 
done but to smash Prussianism; let us do that first, 
and then perhaps we shall get a chance to rebuild 
civilisation on a safer plan. For what is happening 
now is the inevitable outcome of the ideals by which 
we have all been living. Holding, as we have done, 
that the more of this world's goods we could heap 
together the better, and that physical well-being was 
the first of all considerations, no wonder we fight to 
get and keep. Germany has but outdistanced the 
rest of us in this view of life and its meaning. And 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 117 

by the law of the good God all this has recoiled on 
itself and is destroying itself, as it always must in the 
end. Matter is but the sacrament of spirit, the in- 
strument of the soul's probation; if its spiritual use 
be lost sight of or degraded the result is chaos and 
suffering till we learn our lesson better. And with 
all its horrors the war has taught us that the ordinary 
man knows perfectly well when driven back upon it 
that there are things better worth living and dying 
for than can be measured and weighed in material 
symbols. The men who are fighting our battles to- 
day have got up to this level, and it is hardly to be 
supposed that they will entirely come down from 
it when the war is over. It is not Christianity that 
has failed, but ourselves, and we have got to get back 
to first principles and endeavour once more to under- 
stand and, what is much harder, to obey our Master's 
precepts concerning life and its potentialities. 

It is to me inconceivable that mankind at large 
should ever cease from taking interest in the spir- 
itual background of life ; as well expect it to descend 
to the level of the beasts of the field. I use the word 
spiritual in a wide sense to denote all the higher as- 
pects of life — our loves, fellowships, mutual affini- 
ties, social joys, lofty emotions, yearnings, aspira- 
tions, wonderments. Is there anything that so com- 
pletely differentiates us from the brutes as the faculty 
of wonder? Man is the animal with the upward 
look. Think of what music means in the enlarge- 



n8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ment of our spiritual horizons, think of all the poetry 
and the painter's art, all the works of imagination 
that are the common possession of the race, and then 
ask whether it is possible to divorce these for long 
from their true setting in the worship of the Creator. 
The possession of a spiritual nature implies religion, 
and religion we must have, not only as the sanction 
of all that we feel to be great, good, and beautiful 
in our total experience, but as the very soul thereof. 
It is often maintained that the artistic temperament 
can exist without religion, just as morals can and do; 
but the answer to that is that neither of them ever 
really does. The artistic temperament can wallow 
in sensuality, but it is bound to feel the thrill of tran- 
scendental mysteries or it would not be itself; beauty 
is the eternal thrusting through into the temporal, 
and always elusive; he who sees beauty sees God, 
though in a glass darkly. And there is a point be- 
yond which all mere utilitarianism in morals gives 
way to a passion for the ideal which loses itself in 
the skies; ethics may begin in the necessity for fram- 
ing rules to enable human beings to rub along to- 
gether, but soon get beyond that and rise into a region 
where the individual conscience may have to defy 
the whole of society in the name of a higher than 
any merely human law; God stands revealed in the 
very thought of an ideal right towards which to as- 
pire. As Browning has it in the " Guardian 
Angel " — 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 119 

"O World, as God has made it! All is beauty: 
And knowing this is love, and love is duty. 
What further may be sought for or declared?" 

What men are learning on the battlefields of Europe 
of the glory of sacrifice and its mystical potencies is 
drawing them back to God by way of the cross of 
Christ; our vulgar, blatant, worldly, commercial, 
pleasure-loving age is seeing meanings in that cross 
it never saw before, and getting rid of many delu- 
sions in the process. We are being saved as by fire. 
Let us recover the simplicities of life and we recover 
faith. We are re-learning the old, old lesson that 
man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. We are 
realising almost with the surprise of a new discovery 
that not what we have but what we are is the secret 
of blessedness or wretchedness, that there is nothing 
to mourn over but the evil in our own hearts, and that 
death, however sad and dreadful its accompani- 
ments, is but the prelude to vaster ventures of the 
soul and unimaginable joys. Nothing can be killed 
that is worthy to be kept alive or essential to our 
highest well-being here or hereafter. 

If I had my time to come over again I should with 
even greater earnestness try to put first things first. 
The spiritual is not the social any more than it is 
the intellectual; these derive from it but are not it- 
self, and if made a substitute for it can but issue in 
disillusionment. I should fight for social justice with 



120 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

all my might and main, for the abolition of caste 
privilege, grinding poverty, and the all-round ugli- 
fication of life by greed and covetousness. But I 
should know that to try to make men good and happy 
by giving them a perfect environment would be hope- 
less taken by itself. Quicken the spiritual conscious- 
ness, the sense of God, and we shall solve the social 
problem too ; I have no confidence in any other solu- 
tion. The best friends of the working man have 
seen that long ago; was it not Mr. Philip Snowden 
who said that we should never get the Socialised 
State till we had trained all classes to think and feel 
socially? — and what is that but to say that what 
we need is a Church-State, a State which realises it- 
self the Body of Christ and its citizens members one 
of another? We are that already, but we don't 
know it, hence all our troubles. And if Germany, 
by preaching one idea persistently and thoroughly 
for forty years could create a general consciousness 
of national solidarity for predatory purposes, cannot 
servants of Christ everywhere begin to work with 
consecrated determination to create a general con- 
sciousness of spiritual solidarity which will destroy 
all the forces of harm and hate, and superimpose the 
Kingdom of God upon the ruins of the materialistic 
civilisation which is now perishing in smoke and 
flame? There is nothing the matter with the world 
but wickedness, and wickedness, as some of the Alex- 
andrian Fathers would have said, is at bottom noth- 



RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 121 

ing but ignorance. If we only knew our true interest 
no man would ever dream of trying to exploit his 
neighbour. 

So to those who fear for the future of the Chris- 
tian religion I would say, Trouble not yourselves ; it 
is not Christianity that has failed, but Christians. 
All talk about Christianity being on its trial and the 
like is sheer nonsense; it has never been on its trial; 
it is about time it was. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said 
from my pulpit that there had never been more than 
one real Christian and that the world crucified Him. 
Some time after the war started he is reported to 
have said also in reply to a question as to what would 
be the best course to follow when peace returned, 
that he hoped the nations might be persuaded to try 
Christianity for a change. Individuals have tried 
Christianity with a certain amount of success : society 
never. Where, then, is the use of charging a rule 
of life with having proved inadequate to human needs 
when it has never had the chance of showing itself 
equal to them ? And who can doubt that it is equal 
to them, and more than equal ? The one certain cure 
for all our ills would be to get men to live, as John 
Stuart Mill said, so that Jesus Christ would approve 
their life. If that could be done little else would re- 
main to be done, for we should have the disposition 
to get together and help to bear one another's 
burdens instead of adding to them, and that would 
soon solve all our problems. And the curious thing 



122 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

is that there is in every one of us something that can 
be appealed to along this line already. I think it 
would be no exaggeration to say that the two strong- 
est tendencies in human nature are absolutely anti- 
thetical — namely, the tendency towards self-preser- 
vation and the tendency towards self-sacrifice. Call 
for either and you will usually get it according to the 
plane on which you issue your summons. The very 
same men who will do mean and selfish things in the 
ordinary way of business will spring to arms and fling 
their lives away in the hour of their country's need, 
as we are now seeing. This impulse to self-immola- 
tion in presence of a great impersonal ideal, of some- 
thing we feel has the right to demand our uttermost, 
is the very basic principle of the Christian gospel. 
Until it can be eradicated from the human heart there 
can be no question of dethroning Him whose very 
name is the synonym for self-sacrificing love and in 
whose pierced hand is the sceptre of omnipotence. 
May this sombre season in a blood-drenched world 
find us prostrate at His feet. 



CHAPTER XIII 

NOEL AT THE FRONT 

How many people realise, I wonder, that there are 
two New Year's days in the calendar, one in Janu- 
ary and one in December? But it is so. Christmas 
Day is really the beginning of a new year, or was or- 
iginally intended to be such, so perhaps Scottish folk, 
with their characteristic consistency and economy of 
time and other things, have wisdom on their side 
in refusing to celebrate two, and therefore confine 
themselves to the first of January only. I don't 
know how it happens that we have the two within a 
week of each other, though I daresay one could soon 
find out. The history of the calendar is an interest- 
ing and intricate study. The beginning of the year 
has been fixed in nearly every month of the twelve 
by one nation or another, but why the civilised world 
has finally settled upon two separate dates for the 
event, one ecclesiastical and the other legal, I am not 
aware. 

No one knows the day on which Christ was born. 
The great world paid no heed at the time; it was a 
lowly birth unaccompanied by earthly recognition 
and display; though doubtless there was stir enough 
about it in heaven, and, as is said to have been the 

123 



124 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

case with other notable though far less important 
nativities, certain portents and intimations were al- 
lowed to break through to this side for those who had 
eyes to see and ears to hear. But when, generations 
later, the Church was making her way in the world 
and aiming to present her great mysteries to the 
various races who were coming under her sway, she 
in her turn, and very wisely, had to adapt and assim- 
ilate a good deal. She found a good many old-world 
customs and institutions she was willing to let stand, 
even when they bore a quasi-religious character. 
Thus the shrines of local pagan deities were often 
reconsecrated and associated with the name of some 
Christian saint. The people of the neighbourhood 
could still continue to worship there as they had al- 
ways been accustomed to do; if miracles of healing 
had taken place on the spot, as some devoutly be- 
lieved, there was no reason why they should not go 
on taking place even more liberally under Christian 
auspices. These transformations must have pro- 
ceeded very extensively ; there are traces of them even 
in our own country and still more in Ireland. Pro- 
fessor T. R. Gloves says, in his Conflict of Religions 
in the Early Roman Empire, that there is plenty of 
evidence that in southern Italy and elsewhere many of 
the shrines of the Madonna are only those of Isis 
re-named. Be that as it may, there can be no ques- 
tion about the great Christian festivals; there are 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 125 

ancient cosmic anniversaries, relics of nature worship, 
taken over and spiritualised, given a new and higher 
meaning and value. Christmas starts the series; it 
represents the new birth of the sun after the winter 
solstice. We reach the shortest day about the 20th 
of December, the days on which the hours of light 
are fewest and those of darkness are at their max- 
imum. Then follow three or four days during which 
this proportion remains practically unchanged; but 
on the 25th the sun rises a little earlier than hereto- 
fore, and thereafter goes on rising earlier each day 
till midsummer is reached, the amount of light in the 
world increasing all the time, day by day, without in- 
termission save at the next solstice. Were not our 
ecclesiastical fathers right in seeing in this a felicitous 
figure of the coming of Christ into the world? 
What better day could have been chosen on which to 
celebrate the birth of Him who is to all ages the 
Light of the World than what we now know as 
Christmas Day? For, although only heaven knew 
it at the time, there did come a new inpouring of 
divine light into the dark places of the earth on the 
particular day, whenever it was, that Mary's child 
first lay within her arms; something broke through 
from the transcendental world into human life that 
had never been here before, and from that day to 
this the light has grown and broadened, with here 
and there a solstice or a temporarily darkened sky, 



126 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

and will go on increasing till we reach the perfect 
day. The first Christmas Day was the beginning 
of the world's new year. 

Horticulturists tell me that if our ears were quick 
enough to hear it we should know when the miracle 
of the new year takes place; it must inevitably be on 
or about Christmas Day. Vegetation has reached 
its nadir when things are at their darkest; it is not 
cold as much as darkness that forbids growth and 
movement, as witness the snowdrops. Away, deep 
down in the earth, the roots and tendrils hide, 
shrivelled, inert, asleep. On Christmas Day the 
change begins; a new ray has found its way right 
down through sodden soil and dead leaves and in- 
carnated itself in the life beneath; it stays there; it 
does not go back; and day by day more comes, and 
yet more, and yet more, and a whispering tumult 
begins everywhere underground, and in the trunks 
of the trees, and creeps along the branches and the 
twigs ; and a heaving, straining, swelling goes on and 
on until the new life and the old break through to- 
gether in the miracle of the springtime, and fields 
and hedgerows become decked in sudden glory. The 
beauty of bud and blossom, as of all the wealth of 
nature's summer colouring, is only sunlight blending 
with the flesh of flower and thorn. Is not this a 
continual parable of the work of Him whose life is 
the light of men? There are days even in the spring 
when grim winter seems to have resumed his sway, 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 127 

when buds and blossoms are destroyed in lavish 
waste, when the fresh green leaves burn and wither 
before the icy breath of the east wind; but it is never 
really what it seems; life may perish for a moment, 
but the light is still there and will prove the victor by 
and by. 

So, too, must it be with the world war. It is a 
tempest that for the period of its rage seems to have 
destroyed all our idealism, a wintry blast that has 
torn up our fairest fabrics of optimism by the roots; 
but the silent light is steadily at work all the same 
within and beneath the far-spread chaos and destruc- 
tion, perhaps even to some extent by means of it; 
Christ is coming to His own in the ruin of projects 
and objectives incompatible with it. A terrific shak- 
ing is going on in the world of visible values; but 
where is it stated on divine authority that the King- 
dom of God would come without such? Nowhere 
that I know of — on the contrary. " He hath prom- 
ised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth 
only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once 
more, signifieth the removing of those things that 
are shaken, as of things that are made, that those 
things which cannot be shaken may remain." 

My friend the corporal was in a talkative mood 
the other morning. We were sheltering together 
under the flap of a hospital tent, one of those big, 
elaborate erections originally constructed for the 
Coronation Durbar at Delhi (so I am told) , and now 



128 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

very sensibly made use of at the seat of war for the 
housing of our wounded. The rain was coming 
down in sheets, and everywhere around us the camp 
surface was like a muddy lake bubbling and seething 
with the violence of the deluge. When the rain 
stopped — if it ever did stop — the surface flood 
would clear off and the good old mud would appear 
again, seven pounds to each boot as we splashed and 
floundered through it. Rain! I have never seen 
such rain outside the tropics, and it seemed tireless. 
Day after day it went on almost without intermission, 
but on the present occasion it excelled itself and I was 
wondering somewhat ruefully how I should get to my 
own quarters without being thoroughly drenched for 
the second time that morning. 

" Nice cheerful weather, ain't it? " remarked the 
corporal serenely. Nothing ever puts the corporal 
out of countenance, I may observe. " Reg'lar 
Christmas weather this," he went on without waiting 
for any reply. " The only kind of Christmas 
weather we ever see nowadays, blowed if it ain't. 
But if they ever tell me again that Old England is 
the only place where we get it I'll tell them they're 
deluded. We've took a little trip abroad a-purpose 
to find out, and we know sure-/y. 

" Reminds me of last Christmas," he continued in 

a reminiscent tone. " I was up at B then, and 

we had the Saxons opposite to us, not much more 
than fifty yards away. They didn't like the rain 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 129 

no more than we did, you bet; and they stuck as close 
to their dug-outs as they could; so did we except 
for necessary look-out duty. On Christmas Eve we 
started singing a few Christmas ditties. There was 
a big Yorkshireman in my company with a voice it 
was a treat to 'ear, and he sung, ' Once in royal Da- 
vid's City,' ' Christians, Awake,' ' O come, all ye 
faithful,' and things like that, and the rest of us 
joined in as well as we could. And then — would 
you believe it? — we heard the same tunes coming 
from the German trenches. They were singing 'em, 
too, by all that's good. They knew them tunes, 
every one of 'em — not the words, of course; they 
had different words, words of their own that sounded 
like a mixture of Welsh and Aberdeen, but the tunes 
were all right. After a bit, during a pause in the 
double performance, one of 'em gets up on their 
parapet and shouts : ' You English ! Oh, you Eng- 
lish! Speak, you English! We are coming over.' 
We weren't having any for a long time, and stood 
at the ready for fear of treachery. But they kept 
on with their funny cry, ' You English ! ' And at 
last our sergeant says, * Well,' he says, * what d'ye 
want? ' c Christmas! ' they shouts. ' Let's have it 
together, and no fighting.' As soon as we found they 
meant it we caught on, and we had a bully time. 
They were a great lot for singing, that lot were. 
We visited them and they visited us; and we shared 
up the provender as friendly as you please. 



130 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

" One of our chaps got plugged in the leg by a 
sniper while he was taking a 'am across to their side 
to exchange for something they'd got. They rushed 
out and picked him up and carried him back to our 
lines and apologised, saying the sniper didn't know 
about the truce. Then they went off at 'im — the 
sniper, I mean — and brought 'im in, too, to explain 
and shake hands with the man he'd plugged. And 
we got more and more friendly after that, and mixed 
up anyhow, till at last orders came from the officers 
on both sides that the Christmas festivities had gone 
on long enough and were to stop, for we were getting 
into the new year, you see, and were making peace 
all on our own, so to speak, without waiting for the 
war to finish. 

" But the Saxon fellows took a lot of stopping. 
They didn't want to fight, not they. In the end, to 
get rid of 'em we had to carry 'em one by one, a leg 
and a wing, back to their own trenches and dump 
'em in. And they weren't all drunk either! No 
sooner had the dumping party got back to our lines 
than a German officer jumps up and sits down on the 
parapet of theirs with his back towards us. ' Get 
down,' we shouted, but he took no notice. We kept 
on telling him to get down or we'd have to shoot, but 
still he took no notice. After a while we fired over 
his 'ead to frighten 'im. But, bless you, he didn't go 
then, and what do you think he did? 'E turns 'is 
'ead over 'is shoulder without shifting 'is position, 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 131 

and 'e says, smiling like, c Oh, you English, you think 
to frighten me. But I know I am safer with my back 
to you than if I turned my face.' 

" What could we do? We couldn't kill the man, 
so we just had to let him be. 

" The Saxons were moved soon after that, but 
before they went they told us that if Prussians were 
coming in their place they would signal to let us 
know. And they did. They put a board up, and 
all it said on it was ' Look out.' And we understood. 
The Prussians didn't try any of the brotherly love 
business. But ain't it wonderful what Christmas 
will do?" 

It is wonderful, indeed. The birthday of the 
Prince of Peace is being celebrated this year as last 
amid the terrors of a world-war, but it is still a po- 
tent fact, nevertheless. All that is tender and 
gracious in human feeling seems to cluster round it 
and to become indissolubly associated with it. The 
spirit of the Christ-Child who was born in a stable 
and cradled in a manger will yet show itself stronger 
than Kaiserism and all its works. 

Mr. Roosevelt is reported as saying that morally 
civilisation has gained nothing since the Napoleonic 
wars. We are as predatory as ever and as ruthless. 
The law of the jungle is still stronger than the Golden 
Rule in the relations of states and individuals to all 
appearance. 

Well, it may be so. It would be difficult to prove 



132 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

either way. What we have gained in one direction 
we may have lost in another, and vice versa. But 
my own experience is — and everything I have seen 
in the war zone only goes to confirm it — that the 
mightiest force in human affairs to-day is that which 
the Christmas festival celebrates. If, on the one 
hand, we are shocked and startled at the savage de- 
pravity of German military methods, we can but 
stand amazed, on the other, at the wealth of simple 
kindness that abounds, conjoined to the most heroic 
self-sacrifice. 

For what a kindly creature Tommy is, with not a 
trace of vindictiveness in his composition. And he 
is a good deal of a sentimentalist too, one is sur- 
prised to find. Again and again I have been struck 
by the fact that in camp concerts the song that strikes 
the human note, the note of simple, homely joys, 
of heart's affection and loyalty, is the one most 
rapturously received. He is not particular, as a 
rule, to what Church you belong, or whether you be- 
long to any Church at all, but you must not make 
light of the name of Christ. " Hark, the Herald 
Angels Sing " will be sung with a will at many a point 
on the firing-line this Christmas, and Tommy will be 
conscious of no incongruity in the strange conjunc- 
tion of experiences. He will be thinking of home 
and bright eyes and Christmas cheer, and in his mind 
these realities will be bound up somehow with the 
greatest miracle of all ages, the birth of Mary's child 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 133 

whose fuller advent by and by is to put an end to war 
forever. 

Among the patients I visited in hospital this week 
was a rubicund young chap who had come in with 
" trench feet," as they are only too accurately called. 
Imagine what it must be to fight up to your waist in 
water, especially if the water freezes in your boots. 
I have seen some ugly results from this, but we will 
not discuss them. This boy of mine had got the 
complaint badly and must have been in much pain, 
but, as usual, he was ready to make the best of it. 
" I never saw my boots for three months," he re- 
marked with pardonable exaggeration. " They 
were never out of the mud, I quite forgot I had any 
feet, and was very surprised when they turned up 
again yesterday." Brave, light-hearted lad! He 
had no prospect of going home for Christmas, but 
was eagerly looking forward to the Christmas jolli- 
ties that were being prepared on the spot. They are 
to have a Christmas tree there, I understand, with 
a thousand gifts on it. What a Christmas tree! 
Kind friends at home sent me out packages which 
went a long way towards furnishing it, but I shall 
not be able to stay to see it up as I should dearly like 
to do. 

They are to have Holy Communion in the ward 
on Christmas morning, and then there is to be a 
day of such brightness and delight as generous hearts 
in England and equally generous hearts here can fur- 



134 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

nish. A French military band is coming in to play 
to them — to play their own Christmas hymns if you 
please — and a great deal more besides. God bless 
the chaplains, doctors, nurses, and all others who are 
contributing in any way to make up to these heroes 
for what they lose at Christmastime through having 
to be absent from home, fighting our battles in a 
foreign land. 

And a fine thing this boy with the trench feet has 
just told me. The Germans made desperate counter- 
attacks at Loos to try to regain the trenches our men 
had won from them. They failed, but the struggle 
was terrible while it lasted. Again and again they 
were thrown back with appalling loss, and, said my 
young informant, " one of our sergeants started 
the song, and every time we hurled the enemy off we 
sang with all our might, ' Keep the home fires burn- 
ing.' " 

It brings a lump to one's throat to hear testimony 
like this. Mr. Roosevelt is a healthy-minded man 
if there be one on this planet, and he knows that 
humanity's real gains are never to be measured by 
immunity from catastrophe, neither is its good de- 
stroyed by the impact of disaster in outward things. 
It simply is not true to say, as is so often done just 
now, that the war has either thrown us back morally 
or shown that any previous advance under Christian 
influences was only illusory. The world was a worse 
world, a more selfish and sordid world, before the 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 135 

war began than it is to-day. This is not to praise 
the war. One does not praise the fever that reveals 
the filthiness a man had in his blood when he thought 
he was well. When you are tempted to sigh over the 
failure of the promise associated with the advent of 
the Prince of Peace nearly two millenniums ago, for- 
bear. It is no failure but a probation. 
It is Mr. Chesterson who sings — 

"The day is ours till sunset, 
Holly, and fire, and snow, 
And the name of our dead brother 
Who loved us long ago " ? 

The sentiment is receiving strange exemplification 
in the war zone at this advent season. One hears 
weird and moving stories which all point to the same 
thing — namely, that the veil between seen and un- 
seen is getting thinner and the thought of the Christ- 
child more intense. Men are believing in the mystic 
significance of Yuletide who never paid much heed 
to it before save in the matter of bacchanalian riot. 
What is it they whisper to each other about the White 
Comrade who is seen passing over the field of bat- 
tle and where He treads is peace and easing of agony 
to the stricken? It may be fancy, and it may not. 
Heaven is but a thought away even from the deepest 
depths of hell. Men fresh from the trenches tell me 
of the miraculous preservation of sacred emblems 
under shell-fire. A church will be shattered to pieces 
and the life-size Christus over the high altar left 



136 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

standing intact. The very glass and wire protection 
outside the shrine which encloses the image of the 
Virgin Mother and her Babe will be shivered into 
dust and the divine figures sustain no injury. Even 
an altar will be torn to fragments and the Blessed 
Sacrament left inviolate. 

Are these tales true or the product of excited im- 
agination? I know not, but they come from many 
quarters. Why should marble forms and features 
of painted wood be miraculously preserved when flesh 
and bone are rent and crushed? Again, I know not; 
may it be as a testimony that the tornado of human 
passion has no power to imperil aught that pertains 
to eternity? A group of soldiers, the sole survivors 
of a regiment, tell me they saw not long ago a church 
ablaze during a fierce engagement in the middle of 
the night. In the graveyard adjoining was a gi- 
gantic crucifix, and as the flames leaped up from the 
burning edifice it seemed to the awe-stricken watchers 
as though the white body upon the cross came to life 
and pointed with majestic hand away beyond the 
hell of man's making to where the gentle dawn was 
pressing through the eastern sky. It was a quasi- 
supernatural reminder that the ruin wrought by 
earthly evil reaches not so very far. 

11 Ah, m'sieu," said a Walloon peasant, " you see 
not the wonder of the Child-God. You are too 
busy, m'sieu, and too safe, n'est ce pas? No one 



NOEL AT THE FRONT 137 

sees that wonder till he is prepared to die like the 
crucified, and then he knows assuredly that nothing 
holy can be killed, and that the royal Babe reigns even 
in the midst of strife and trouble, see you. Our good 
cure saw Him after midnight mass last Christmas 
Eve, vraiment. There was no church, m'sieu, no 
church left. The Boches had burnt it, and there 
were only blackened walls ; and the altar — helas ! — 
the swine had made a table of it, and ate and drank 
and profaned the name of the Bon Dieu. But the 
good father he said his mass for the living and the 
dead out yonder in the snow just the same. And 
then he saw Him — oh, believe me, yes — he saw 
Him on His throne above where the altar stood, and 
a shining crown upon His head, and His little hand 
uplift to bless, and before Him knelt all the dead of 
our village, m'sieu — my brothers Jean, Pierre, and 
my uncle, the sacristan whom they had stabbed in the 
doorway, yes. And the good sister, too, was there 
whom they had desecrated and then murdered, the 
sister who was the bride of Christ. And she smiled 
with gladness, and they all looked, oh, so happy. 
But you do not believe, m'sieu, for you are English 
and a heretic. But no? " 

It is all true, every word of it, whatever be the 
symbolism in which the truth finds utterance. It 
reminds one of the vision of Sir Galahad at the 
sacring of the mass in his quest for the Holy Grail — 



138 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

11 1 saw the fiery face as of a child 
That smote itself into the bread and -went." 

But this was he, the pure of heart, who had also 
heard the summons — 

"O Galahad, and O Galahad, follow me." 



CHAPTER XIV 

RETROSPECT 

Nearly a year and a half we have been at war now, 
and the blood total is mounting up steadily and grief 
and tears keeping pace with it. Once more we are 
approaching the last hours of an old year, the year 
in which it was confidently prophesied the war would 
end and end in our favour. Who will dare assume 
the role of prophet now? Looking forward is not 
an exhilarating business, but we cannot help looking 
back. Has there ever been a year like this in all our 
history, a year so packed with misery and sorrow, a 
year so heavy-laden with sinister portents for man- 
kind at large? We can scarcely remember what the 
world was like before the war, so drastically different 
is the world of to-day; and yet we are compelled to 
think of it — wistfully, remorsefully, sadly as the 
case may be, but think of it we must. We did not 
know then what we know now, nor had we visualised 
what the future could bring as we are only too trag- 
ically familiar with it now. It is a changed world, 
and we are a changed people. 

What have we learned in the grim period through 
which we have passed and are passing still? Well, 
for one thing we have had to realise that there are no 

139 



i 4 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

short cuts to well-being. Was ever anything more 
pitiful than the downfall of the hopes and dreams em- 
bodied in the social legislation of a few years ago by 
the Government whose chief representatives are still 
in power? When I went to America in the autumn 
of 191 1 it was the one thing audiences over there 
wanted to hear about. England had inaugurated a 
new era, they said, an era of prosperity, contentment 
and justice for all. The rest of the nations would be 
bound to follow, even America. " The most demo- 
cratic country in the world to-day," declared the 
chairman of one of my meetings in the middle west, 
"is not the United States, but Great Britain; it is 
giving a lead to all others in daring idealism, public 
righteousness, and the development of the arts of 
peace. We are watching with earnest and respectful 
attention your numerous notable experiments in the 
endeavour to evolve a brighter, happier, and nobler 
social order. The day of privilege is over ; and inter- 
national consciousness is dawning; and now, as many 
times already, it is England that is leading the way 
towards humanity's promised land." It made one's 
heart beat quicker to hear all this about one's native 
country from the lips of statesmen of another and 
younger nation. How proud I was and how confi- 
dent! I believed all this myself, believed it ardently 
and without misgiving. Over and over again I 
had to tell the story of the Great Budget and the 
many economic reforms associated with the name of 



RETROSPECT 141 

Mr. Lloyd George. And the questions that poured 
in afterwards ! Whatever may have been thought in 
England at the time, there is no doubt that in the 
great Republic of the West our young Chancellor of 
the Exchequer was popularly regarded as the Mes- 
siah of a new kind of civilisation, a civilisation that 
would get rid of the extremes of hopeless destitution 
at one end of the social scale and heartless luxury at 
the other, a civilisation whose chief note was to be the 
pooling and organisation of our common resources 
for the benefit of each and all — in a word, the chris- 
tianising of human society. The shadow of militar- 
ism was scarcely felt at all — in America — and only 
occasionally made us uneasy over here. 

Where has all that world of rosy visions gone to? 
We recall the fierceness of the struggle over the 
Parliament Act and the far-reaching social measures 
that preceded and followed it, and we wonder what 
we were raving about. Are we the people that 
prated of revolution, civil war, and all the rest of it? 
Was it, indeed, ever seriously contemplated to in- 
voke military force to save the last remnants of 
feudalism? Where are the fire-eaters now who used 
to gabble in clubs about falling back on the army and 
forcing a coup d'etat " to get rid of the junta that 
for the time being had gained control of the legisla- 
tive machine and the king's person " ? Where are 
the financiers who raised the cry of panic at the bare 
suggestion of having to pay into the Treasury a 



i 4 2 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

larger proportion of their unearned increment, or 
the landowners who vociferated that they must go to 
the wall if the exactions detailed in Form IV were 
literally to be enforced? How they one and all 
hated the little Welsh attorney! Where have they 
all got to and their woes? O temporal O mores! 
O human consistency ! Not a few of them are clam- 
ouring for the little Welsh attorney to be made Prime 
Minister. As Minister of Munitions he has lifted 
more out of their pockets in a few weeks than in all 
the years of his chancellorship, and they complain 
not at all. But he on his part — I should like to 
know what he thinks. The world was not ready for 
his dream of the socialised state ; it was worth dream- 
ing, but human nature was not ready for it. And we 
had forgotten the Kaiser, or tried to think him only a 
bogy. Now we know what we know, alas ! There 
are no devices, no schemes of statesmanship that will 
lift the race suddenly above its true moral level at 
any given time. No system, no proposal, no machin- 
ery will do it, nothing but effort, anguish, soul-purg- 
ing; and even that we must endure one by one. We 
gain more of what is best worth gaining by suffering 
than by comfort. And our kingdom is not of this 
world. 

We have learned, further, what we knew before, 
but did not care to dwell upon, that the chief feature 
of human lot is its instability and undependableness. 
As change takes place from day to day we do not 






RETROSPECT 143 

realise this or we put it from us as an uncomfortable 
thought. But when some cataclysm comes such as 
this world war we are compelled to look facts in the 
face and reckon accordingly. I know of a man who 
had live fine sons. He was very proud of them, as 
well he might be, and they thought a good deal of 
him too. No one could observe the family without 
taking note of the brightness and bonhomie of its 
members with one another. The one grand set pur- 
pose of the father's life was that of securing advance- 
ment for his boys. It was not an unworthy motive 
of action, and I do not suppose it ever entered his 
mind that there was any likelihood of its remaining 
unfulfilled unless something happened to himself per- 
sonally, such as failure of health or premature death. 
To-day he is alive and well and all those splendid 
sons for whom he worked and planned lie in soldiers' 
graves in Flanders. Who could have foreseen it; 
and what is the man to do now who has thus, with 
such appalling completeness, been deprived of the 
light of his eyes and his one chief incentive to en- 
deavour? Ah, if he were the only one! 

But he is not the only one by many thousands. 
We have all lost some one or something through the 
war, and I should suppose there is hardly one among 
us who has not lost a great deal. The number of 
people who have lost practically everything, not only 
their dearest but their substance, been utterly ruined, 
in fact, by the sudden stoppage of their particular 



144 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

business, cannot be small. One wonders how many 
of them had reckoned with it as a possibility before- 
hand. And then the hold on life. What have such 
people left to hold on to ? One must have something 
to live for, something as a point for one's energies, 
something to make effort seem worth while, or life 
becomes a burden and a weariness, " goes disspirit- 
edly, glad to finish.'' There must be many in this 
mood at the present hour. A hurricane has swept 
through their place of habitation, their little world of 
hopes and dreams and customary duties, joys and sor- 
rows, and left them standing alive in the midst of a 
desert. How are they to begin again? Stripped 
bare of all incentive to action, they discover, if they 
never knew it before, that no man can live to him- 
self alone ; the spice of life is in its relationships ; take 
these away and it is over. I question if an absolutely 
selfish life has been ever lived or could be; it would 
be intolerable. Ours is a world of much kindness 
and of but little gratitude. The people we love the 
best are seldom those who have done the most for us; 
more often it is those for whom we have done the 
most. How frequently the cry of a mourner is that 
what he or she misses most in the blank silence of 
bereavement is the former joy of rendering service 
to the one who is gone ! " He needed me so," they 
will tell you ; " no one needs me now in the same way. 
I keep on thinking I hear him call, or my foot is on 



RETROSPECT 145 

the stairs to go to him, and then I remember that he 
isn't there and never will be there any more." 

No, life never will be again as it was yesterday; it 
changes from hour to hour. If its livableness con- 
sists only in the permanence of the experiences which 
to-day seem to us to give it its chiefest value we are 
doomed to unhappiness. They will not stay; they 
are bound to go soon or late, swiftly or slowly. And 
to some minds this is inexpressibly sad; it seems to 
cheapen human nature so. Why, we ourselves 
change with the passing of the years, change far 
more radically than, perhaps, at all times we should 
care to admit. Go back ten, twenty, thirty, fifty 
years, and see how your outlook on life has altered 
with them. The things you wanted, the people you 
loved, the events that had power to cause you 
pleasure or pain have all, or nearly all, undergone 
drastic transformation. You may even be a little 
ashamed of it. Are you the same person who longed 
for a particular gratification so much that you were 
almost prepared to cut your throat because you 
couldn't get it? Yes, in very deed; would you like 
to have it now? The chances are a thousand to one 
that you would not. And deep though some trag- 
edies through which you have passed have set their 
mark upon you, you would not be honest if you did 
not confess that time has made a difference. You 
thought your heart was broken, and perhaps it was; 



146 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

you will never be quite the same man again; but you 
were wrong when you thought that that was the end 
of everything for you so far as this life is concerned; 
you have done and suffered a good deal since, and 
you will do and suffer more. You reproach your- 
self, perhaps, that you could so easily forget. You 
hate to think that a love which once absorbed your 
whole soul and brought out the very best that was in 
you could pass as the seasons pass and be no more 
than a golden memory, more and more dreamlike as 
year succeeds to year. But so it is; time is a won- 
derful healer, and a still more wonderful magician, 
weaving his spells of oblivion over the brightest 
as over the darkest hours of the past. We may 
wish it were not so, but it is. Life seems to roll 
over us, as it were, without ever uniting us im- 
movably to anything, good or bad, great or small. 
I am the same person that I was five and forty years 
ago; I have the feeling of identity, of unbroken con- 
tinuity, though it would be hard to explain or justify 
it in any intelligible fashion. I am sure I am the 
same person, but nothing else is the same to my per- 
ceptions to-day, either within me or without, that it 
was then. Beautiful things, glorious things, wonder- 
ful fellowships have come and gone ; can it really be 
that they are as though they had never been ? Is the 
very best and sweetest that can be lived or imagined 
in the intercourse of soul with soul here on earth no 
more than a mirage, a drifting cloud, a bubble on a 



RETROSPECT 147 

stream? How the suggestion tends to lower their 
worth! And the cynic smiles and says, Even so. 

"Ah, ray beloved, fill the cup that clears 
To-day of past regrets and future fears. 
To-morrow? Why, to-morrow I may be 
Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years." 

Is that all? If it were I should have nothing to 
write about, and all poetry and vision would be blot- 
ted out of human hearts. It is the outside of life, 
and that only, that is unstable and fleeting. The 
very things that to us in an ordinary way seem most 
solid and imperishable are the things that have the 
seal of death upon them, whereas our spiritual re- 
action to them, which seems so utterly ephemeral, is 
everlasting. It is selves that are real, not worlds. 
A child's glad cry at the sight of his father is a fact 
which in its essence will outlast the solar system. It 
is the brain that forgets, the soul never. You need 
not be ashamed that your memories even of tender 
and gracious things, things to which your heart is 
ever loyal, grow dim with the passing of the years; 
they have not failed nor diminished in intensity one 
iota; it is the poor dying body that has failed and 
overlaid them with dust and clay. Have you never 
watched the miracle of the resurrection of buried 
faculty in the dying? You will sometimes hear them 
murmuring names you never knew; sometimes with 
wide-open eyes and radiant face they appear to be 
greeting persons you cannot see, as I truly believe 



i 4 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

they are. You will find them going back and back 
even to childhood's happy hours and living them over 
again with a peculiar gladness, gladness that ignores 
nothing that lies between. Have you ever been close 
to the great transition yourself? I have more than 
once, and can bear witness that nothing is ever lost 
or forgotten that has once been an authentic posses- 
sion of the soul, and the pain with which we have 
acquired it or parted from it for a season serves but 
to give keener joy to its recovery. It is all there, 
stored up in the subconscious deeps, and becomes 
more than ever ours when the illusions of sense no 
longer bar our apprehension of it. Thus to look 
back is to look forward, but with the shadows gone. 



CHAPTER XV 

OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 

Some one nearly related to me once said that he 
found it impossible to view the approach of a new- 
year without some measure of misgiving. The cus- 
tomary exchange of friendly greetings at this season 
caused him a certain amount of unconfessed per- 
turbation. He never could hear the words, " A 
Happy New Year," without something akin to a 
shiver of dread. He could not help wondering what 
the new year had in store for the speaker and those 
he addressed, and whether it might not contain more 
sorrow than joy, be big with unforeseen catastrophe. 
You may call this morbid, and so perhaps it was, 
though the person I have in mind was not of morbid 
temperament; but there was a good deal to justify 
his attitude. Again and again he had noticed how 
friends of his, full of cheery anticipation at the be- 
ginning of a new year, had been visited by tragedy 
before the end of it, how those well and strong had 
uttered the ancient good wish to the weak and sickly 
and themselves been cut down by the hand of death 
within a few weeks or months, leaving the objects 
of their solicitude to mourn their loss in utter deso- 
lation. It was because of things like these, he said, 

149 



150 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

that he rather shrank from giving or receiving the 
conventional salutation, " A Happy New Year." 

Many people will sympathise with him this year 
who would not have done so before. We cannot 
look forward lightheartedly after such a year of suf- 
focating horror as that which has just closed. A 
year which has witnessed the Lusitania infamy and 
the massacre and rape of a million helpless Armen- 
ians, to speak of nothing else, will stand out in the 
annals of our time as one of peculiar darkness and 
depravity. That theatrical potentate, the Kaiser, 
who with the Junker caste deliberately made the war 
to save his dynasty and their order from being over- 
whelmed by the advancing forces of German democ- 
racy, has been issuing directions to his public for a 
sober observance of the season. There are to be no 
festivities, no gaieties within Berlin court circles or 
elsewhere that its influence extends. The War Lord 
thinks it unfitting that at a time when the Fatherland 
in particular and civilisation in general are enduring 
such unspeakable calamities there should be any at- 
tempt at merry-making — or, presumably, New Year 
greetings on the old lines, unless " Gott strafe Eng- 
land " can be considered such. He is full of pious 
exhortations and apostrophes as usual, but what 
about those slaughtered Armenians? They seem to 
lie lightly on the Hohenzollern conscience; but God 
is not mocked, and there will be a reckoning. Does 
he see it coming, I wonder? We on our part have 



OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 151 

now settled down to the war in grim earnest and 
there is not much optimism about. Any fancies we 
ever had as to a speedy termination of this bloody 
struggle are over and done with, I should think. 
We know now what we are up against, though it has 
taken a long time to bring it home to us, and we are 
beginning to have a truer conception of what it is go- 
ing to cost us. The war, the war, the war — we can 
think of little else, and we enter upon this new year 
with less buoyancy, perhaps, but more determination 
than last; less vapouring about the inevitable end, 
and so forth, but with a quieter, sterner, more thor- 
ough grasp of the whole situation and our wills set to 
see it through. That is all we can say; we dare not 
mortgage the future any more. Instead of wishing 
each other a Happy New Year — there is no harm 
in that, to be sure, but to many thousands of be- 
reaved and sorrowing ones it would seem sadly out 
of place — we shall wish, and doggedly wish, and 
work, and sacrifice, and fight till our cruel foe is 
broken and the world is once more free to betake 
itself to happy laughter and song. The Germans 
know this as well as we, hence their frenzied hatred 
of us. Careful neutral observers tell us that their 
new hate, which we might call the 19 16 brand, is 
born of fear, the fear which has replaced the old 
contempt. They have learned by now that they mis- 
understood us, underestimated us, saw us in a false 
light. No wonder they did, however — we gave 



1 52 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

them every opportunity. Truly we are a curious 
folk, or rather, most of my readers are, for not be- 
ing an Anglo-Saxon myself, I am sometimes as puz- 
zled by your temperament as the foreign. Slow, 
deficient in imagination, undisciplined, often muddle- 
headed, fumbling and blundering his way along, 
somehow the Englishman always gets there in the 
end. It is his tenacity the enemy fears now ; he finds 
it is there still, just as it was a thousand years ago. 
John Bull will never give in; the worse things look 
the more he will grip hold and keep hold till victory 
is secured. In the process he will curse his own 
leaders and everybody else, high and low, as no Ger- 
man would ever dream of doing; he will wash his 
dirty linen in public with utter obliviousness of the 
consequences on the public mind of other nations, 
friendly or unfriendly. He does not care what any- 
body thinks of him ; it would be better if he did. For 
a long time Germans believed that when English- 
men angrily criticised those who had the direction 
of the war, so far as our part in it is concerned, they 
must be panic-stricken and almost at the point of 
revolution. They know better now. They know 
that that bulldog grasp on their throat is not coming 
off till the menace of the mailed fist is forever de- 
stroyed. Perhaps not all Germans know it even yet, 
but the knowledge is spreading rapidly, and it will 
not be possible much longer for official lies to hide 
it from the mass of the people. 



OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 153 

And then what will happen? I don't know; no- 
body knows; but there are several things that may 
happen. Is it possible that we may refuse to treat 
with the Hohenzollerns at all? Will Germany have 
to find another mouthpiece? Will the gagged and 
silent multitude find its tongue? Will our arms set 
Germany herself free? It would be a wonderful 
result of the war if this should happen; it would 
be a war of liberation indeed, far beyond the scope 
of any statesman's forecast when it began. And 
why not? As I have just said, there is small doubt 
that one great reason why the Kaiser and the privi- 
leged orders wished for war and provoked it was 
because they foresaw that within the next ten years 
social democracy in the Reichstag and in the empire 
at large would be strong enough to dispossess them 
and seize the reins of power. Like Napoleon III, 
forty years ago, they saw that the only way to avert 
this was to wage a successful war. And in this they 
calculated rightly. If Germany were to win in the 
present contest, the yoke of militarism, with all its 
anti-popular, anti-liberty accompaniments, would be 
riveted upon the necks of the German people more 
firmly than ever. But they thought England would 
keep out of it, or would be able to do little if she 
came in, and there they calculated wrongly. It is the 
cause of freedom and justice, as opposed to privilege 
and brutal tyranny, that rests on our arms to-day. A 
democratic Germany would not be a Germany to be 



154 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

dreaded by her neighbours, albeit a happier and more 
prosperous Germany than that which entered upon 
this conflict a year and a half ago. If Germany 
could be made a republic there would be no more 
fear of the violation of treaties and the menace of 
militarism. That is our real way of escape from a 
renewal of this wicked strife. Get rid of these mil- 
itary monarchies and you get rid of war. Democ- 
racies are never aggressive, history notwithstanding. 
They were no true democracies that made the wars of 
old. A Germany with the spirit of the United 
States, not to speak of our own, which is a democ- 
racy under monarchical forms, would be a Germany 
at peace with all the world. With such a Germany 
we could and would form a pact of comradeship at 
once at the conclusion of the war. There would be 
no reason why we should do otherwise, and I believe 
no bitterness would survive between the two nations, 
as it is almost certain to do if Kaiserism and the mili- 
tary caste are left in the dominating position they 
now hold. This is one great thing to hope for as an 
outcome of the present terrible upheaval, a republi- 
can Germany or Germany and Austria, a United 
States of Middle Europe. In time we should all 
become members of such a Federation; and even if 
not we could almost afford to beat our swords into 
plough-shares and our spears into pruning hooks. 
Give us democratic control in the monarchically 



OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 155 

ruled nations of the world and there will be no more 
wars. 

This would be a thing worth fighting for, and prob- 
ably it is what Europe is fighting for without knowing 
it. But we have got to win, and there must be no 
slackening of the pace until we do win. If Germany 
wins, the cause of humanity is lost for generations 
to come. I was going to say the cause of free insti- 
tutions would be lost, the cause which assumes in ev- 
ery man a certain sovereignty, a certain value to the 
whole as a responsible, self-directing unit. But it 
is something much more serious than that. That, 
taken by itself, has happened before. The Roman 
empire — born of a republic, by the way — crushed 
political freedom, interest, and initiative while allow- 
ing the largest scope in other ways to the nations 
under its sway; and it is at least an arguable propo- 
sition that this was a benefit to mankind in the long 
run, for the energy thus refused a political outlet 
ran into other channels and enriched the spiritual 
output of the world. But that would not be so now. 
Germany's conception of Kultur forbids. It is a 
tyranny over minds as well as bodies ; it forces every- 
thing into the mould of intellectual efficiency for ma- 
terialistic ends, and sacrifices all the finer sides of hu- 
man nature to this monster of its own creating. The 
educational system under which her unfortunate 
youth are brought up presupposes that man is nothing 



156 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

but a brain and a body; the soul and its needs it ig- 
nores. Civilisation as a whole has suffered not a 
little from this danger. We have been measuring 
all our good in material symbols, making a fetish of 
progress, talking and acting as though we had no 
goal of endeavour but that which is bounded by the 
senses. Would to God that the world were poor, 
and simple, and clean. When we speak about the 
future do we ever stop to analyse what we mean? 
What would it matter to the mother whose only son 
lies buried in front of the German lines somewhere 
in France that ages hence a saner, sweeter society 
should live and grow on that same soil because he 
shed his blood there? How will it comfort a grief- 
stricken wife to be told that her husband was torn 
in pieces out yonder in Gallipoli that the England 
of a hundred years hence might be a happier, richer, 
more contented England than the England of yester- 
day? They would each demand to know, woman- 
like, what there was to be as compensation for the 
men who died to make this future possible, and what 
in the way of comfort for their own stricken hearts 
here and now. There is something to be said for 
the Irishman who objected to working for posterity. 
" What has posterity done for us?" was his not 
unnatural inquiry. I say that every man whose 
bones lie rotting in French or Belgian earth to-day 
that England's future may be secured, must have a 
place and a stake in the grand result or the price was 



OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 157 

not worth paying. I look beneath all this agony 
and beyond all that politicians give as the reasons for 
it, and I see that it is a clash of ideals, a battle of 
souls that is going on ; and in the long run that con- 
cerns, not perishable flesh, but immortal spirit. 

We are going to win. Be sure of it. We are 
hearing much from our friends and our enemies 
about our appalling mistakes and the frightful toll 
they have exacted in human blood and anguish. We 
have made them, beyond doubt, and the story that 
will one day be told about them will be a terrible one, 
amazing in the fatuity and utter incompetence it re- 
veals on the part of men we trusted and believed in. 
An officer remarked to me in France that if the whole 
truth were known now regarding the crass stupidity 
and gross negligence in high quarters which have 
squandered thousands of precious lives there would 
not be lamp-posts enough to go round on which to 
hang the guilty parties. This may be so; but not all 
the blunders have been on our side. The worst mis- 
take of the whole war was perpetrated not by Eng- 
land but by Germany. In those first few awful 
weeks, when the German armies were sweeping 
southward and westward bearing our brave boys be- 
fore them, they had the greatest chance they are ever 
going to have of concluding the war speedily in 
their own favour — and they lost it. Paris was 
to them like a bunch of carrots before a donkey's 
nose. Their higher command was determined 



158 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

they should get there at all costs; so on they went 
in their mad rush, lengthening out their lines 
of communication, outstripping their transport, and 
finally left short of ammunition and in imminent 
danger of being cut off from their far-distant bases 
by a flank attack. That was why the sudden 
retreat took place which culminated in the battle 
of the Marne and the protracted trench warfare 
of the sixteen months that have followed. But note 
this: If the German higher command had made 
sure of the coast first they might, and probably 
would, have had Paris at their mercy afterwards and 
made our task immeasurably more difficult. Some 
of those who ought to know have told me that every- 
thing north of the Loire would have been in their 
hands. What was there to stop them? Calais was 
undefended; Boulogne was actually declared an open 
town. They had only to walk in and take posses- 
sion, and thus prevent us coming to the rescue ex- 
cept by a much longer and far more dangerous route. 
They did not do it, and have lost their chance for 
ever. They have been fighting for Calais ever since, 
and will never get it, nor Paris either. Say what you 
will about the Dardanelles or the Balkans or what 
not; nothing we have ever done or left undone is 
comparable in its disastrous consequences to this 
colossal failure of the much-vaunted German mil- 
itary machine and its up-to-date scientific methods as 
contrasted with our rough-and-tumble sort. We 



OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 159 

were not ready ; they were. France was caught nap- 
ping; they knew it. And yet they collapsed. The 
war was lost to Germany in the first three weeks. 
Let us take comfort; all the fools are not in Eng- 
land. We have nothing in our record as bad as that. 

We have much to suffer yet, and perhaps for long 
too — who knows? There are many more tears to 
flow and many more hearts to break. God only 
knows whether we can bear the strain for the full 
period required for victory satisfying and complete. 
But it is more a question of nerve than resources, 
and I cannot imagine England's nerve giving way. 
We have a righteous cause and a clear issue before 
us, and these alone are assets of the greatest worth. 
We give ourselves and our best beloved in the strife, 
but we give both for an eternity in which every pang 
turns to power and every sorrow is swallowed up in 
joy. 

So with a solemn yet cheerful confidence I wish 
all who read these pages a Happy New Year — in 
19 17 or may be later. 



CHAPTER XVI 

WHAT IS HELL? 

This is perhaps a strange subject for the pages of 
a popular publication, but it is the editor's choice, 
not mine ; and I presume he has his own reasons for 
wishing to have it discussed at the present time. I 
have more than once remarked from the pulpit that 
there is no subject on which popular thought stands 
in greater need of being clarified. Within the past 
forty years or so there has been a marked tendency 
towards the rejection of the ancient belief in hell as 
a place or state of everlasting punishment for the 
wicked after death or after the general judgment. 
This change may be illustrated from the comparative 
silence of the pulpit on the question. Indeed, I may 
remark that the only time I have heard it mentioned 
in the pulpit within recent years, except by myself 
occasionally, was when Mr. Lloyd George spoke of 
it in his memorable speech in the City Temple in the 
autumn of 19 14. It was very impressively done too. 
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he then was, 
turned preacher for a few moments in his appeal to 
all ranks and classes, and especially the young men, 
to come forward and do their best for their country 
in her hour of need. Would any man hang back 

160 



WHAT IS HELL? 161 

through fear of death? he asked. Death would 
come to all soon or late, and then what? "After 
death the Judgment," said the speaker in solemn 
tones, amid the deep hush of the audience. " After 
death the Judgment," he repeated. " If you have 
failed in your duty, with what feelings will you look 
forward to that?" It was a searching utterance, 
gravely and weightily made, and all the more so as 
coming not from a minister of religion but a states- 
man. I wondered at the time what others thought 
of it ; my own feeling was that such warnings ought 
to be more frequently given in sermons and by the 
printed page if only we knew how to do it effectively. 
The revolt against the dogma of eternal torment as 
popularly construed has gone too far. It has led to 
a sort of vague indifference to the Last Things, as 
they are called — namely, Death, Judgment, 
Heaven, and Hell. I think it was Dr. George 
Adam Smith, the present Principal of the University 
of Aberdeen, who said some years ago that for a 
considerable period the tide of general interest had 
been steadily ebbing away from the shores of another 
life. And this is, I think, very true, though the 
causes of it are not wholly traceable to theological 
sources. It is not the omission of this or that doc- 
trine from our pulpit discourses that is mainly re- 
sponsible for the alteration in outlook on the part of 
the laity, but a far more complex set of factors of 
which our increased absorption in material and 



*62 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

utilitarian concerns has been the chief. No doubt 
preachers do refer now and then to the punishment 
of sinners after death: I do not mean to say other- 
wise ; but I should think any of them would admit that 
they do it far less frequently, and with far less dra- 
matic insistence than their predecessors of a genera- 
tion or two back. At that and earlier periods the 
language of preachers when describing the pains of 
hell was often lurid and terrible in the extreme, and 
must have made their hearers shudder with dread. 
It would be no use employing that kind of language 
now, for no one would be moved by it in the least. 
Mr. Spurgeon was the last great preacher who 
habitually went far in this direction, but his was only 
a survival of the method of a race of mighty prophets 
who could paint the evil-doer's doom with such force 
as to work upon his fears and drive him to amend his 
ways. It must have been an awful sermon which 
caused the minister of a certain church to rise from 
his seat when Jonathan Edwards was preaching, and 
cry, with white and trembling lips, " Spare the peo- 
ple; oh, sir, spare the people. " He would not need 
to say it now. 

In some degree this is due to humanitarian con- 
siderations. It is almost universally felt that belief 
in hell and belief in divine love are not mutually 
compatible, especially if hell be unending. Even 
divine justice is difficult to understand in such a con- 
nection; for the worst sin that could be sinned hardly 



WHAT IS HELL? 163 

seems to deserve, on human analogies, an eternity of 
punishment. Then, too, we have come to think of 
the object of punishment as remedial and not merely 
vindictive. If our penal laws have not yet arrived 
at this standpoint the public conscience has. Society, 
in order to protect itself, has to inflict such penalties 
upon criminals as will deter others from following 
their example, but it cannot reasonably be held that 
this motive would govern the actions of God. Most 
people feel, and very naturally, that if God visits 
wrongdoing with pain His object must be the good 
of the transgressor and not the vindication of His 
own dignity or the maintenance of His own security. 
A God who merely tortures the damned without hope 
of remission cannot, it is urged, or rather assumed, 
be benevolent in any intelligible sense. As Tenny- 
son puts it — 

" Hell ? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told, 
The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn 

for his gold, 
And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you say, 
His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish'd away." 

It has further to be admitted that the traditional 
doctrine about hell was shaped in an age when there 
was less sympathy with human suffering and less 
sensitiveness than now. I make this observation 
with reserve, for we have had some sad disillusion- 
ments on the point since the war began. But on the 
whole it must be true. The late Sir James Paget is 
reported to have said that the nervous organisation 



1 64 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

of the civilised man of to-day is so much finer and 
more complex than that of the civilised man in the 
western Europe of, say, the sixteenth century, that 
there is no comparison in the amount of physical 
pain they could respectively bear. No ordinary man, 
he said, could stand the rack to-day for five minutes, 
whereas refined and delicate ladies endured it in the 
ages of persecution without flinching. I am afraid 
that if I were put on the rack myself I should prob- 
ably say anything my tormentors chose to put into 
my mouth, unless I died first of sheer agony, but our 
forefathers, Catholic and Protestant, were racked for 
days on end without giving in. The periods when 
the tortures of the Inquisition were possible, not 
to speak of the burning of heretics at the stake, were 
not periods when people in general could have felt 
pity for sufferers as they do now. When I say now, 
of course I mean in the case of the normal man or 
woman in a country like our own. A friend of mine, 
a distinguished surgeon, tells me he has seen a navvy 
brought into hospital with a great gash in his neck 
and shoulder caused by an accident, and while it was 
being stitched up — the subject refusing an anaes- 
thetic — he maintained an animated conversation 
with a companion, and got so annoyed at some re- 
mark of the latter that in raising himself to con- 
tradict it he tore out some of the stitches and had to 
be told at last that if he did not keep quiet until the 
operation was completed he would be sent home to 



WHAT IS HELL? 165 

manage as best he could. Evidently this gentleman 
was not very sensitive to pain. The same is well 
known of Chinamen, North-American Indians, and 
African natives. What would kill an ordinary white 
man from shock will scarcely discompose them at all. 
One has heard of a Kaffir setting his own foot after 
it had been smashed by a cartwheel going over it. 
Some reader will very likely be thinking at this 
point " Yes, the Germans could send the Lusitania 
to the bottom with hundreds of women and children 
on board, and drop bombs from the sky on helpless 
folk sleeping in their beds, and perpetrate the most 
abominable atrocities on Belgian civilians whose only 
crime was that they had defended their homes. " 
Just so ; I admit it, as I admit the possibility of re- 
version to type in anything. But this monstrous de- 
velopment of German militarism is the result of a 
deliberate policy long entered upon and consistently 
carried out; I cannot think that any other civilised 
nation could be guilty of it. And, broadly speaking, 
we may surely admit without cavil that civilisation 
as a whole has outgrown it. We do not rack and 
burn people to-day, for the simple reason that we 
feel so much more keenly ourselves that we could 
not bear to inflict such torments, much less endure 
them. And we may fairly infer, therefore, that the 
elaboration of the doctrine of hell-fire as the world 
used to be familiar with it would not be possible now. 
It owes its existence to the fact that men were less 



1 66 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

sensitively organised at one time than they are now. 
For the moment I need say no more on the point. 
I am not arguing that the doctrine of divine retribu- 
tion for sin owes its existence to the same conditions; 
that is a very different matter, as we shall see. But 
think of a time when monkish chroniclers, and even 
latter-day Puritans, could teach that the bliss of the 
righteous in heaven would be enhanced by their be- 
ing privileged to witness the writhings of the damned 
in hell! The hearts that could conceive such a sat- 
isfaction must have been hard indeed. What Christ- 
like soul is there to-day, what man or woman of or- 
dinary human feeling, who would not wish to for- 
sake heaven's bliss on such terms and go to the rescue 
of the lost? 

But when all is said and done we must get hell 
back into our practical everyday belief, or rather we 
must get back a reasonable understanding of what it 
is, try to grasp and explain it in terms of the rest of 
our experience of life. This is a great want, I am 
persuaded, and our halting tones when we deal with 
it are not creditable to our Christianity. There is 
a hell, and men ought to be warned to shun it and 
shown why. If the universe is a moral order, that 
moral order must be vindicated against those who 
seek to violate it. Moral standards may and do 
change from age to age and race to race, but that 
there is an ideal right few would deny, or that it is 
our duty to try to find and obey it. There is a true 



WHAT IS HELL? 167 

line of development both for the individual and so- 
ciety; if we refuse to follow it we shall incur ret- 
ribution somewhere and somehow, just as certainly 
as that if we live over a polluted drain we shall go 
down with typhoid, or if we form habits of intem- 
perance we shall be sowing the seeds of corruption 
and early death. Any one can see this law operating 
on the physical plane, but perhaps it is not so obvious 
on the spiritual, though no less certain. Perhaps I 
ought to say here that there is a remedy against the 
spiritual destruction to which it inevitably leads, and 
that, as all Christians believe, is to be sought in the 
redeeming work of Christ; but into that I must not 
enter just now, further than to say that there is a 
point at which divine grace can on repentance super- 
sede the terrible law of measure for measure, the law 
of cause and effect, with which we are so familiar in 
the processes of nature. There is a valuable truth 
in Whittier's line, speaking of the Saviour — 

" To turn aside from thee is hell, 
To walk with thee is heaven." 

Let it not be supposed that it is only God's sove- 
reign act that sends this man to hell and that man to 
heaven. We could almost for the sake of argument 
leave God out of it. The sinner sends himself to 
hell by the way he lives. If evil living did not result 
in disorder, and did not recoil upon the transgressor, 
there would be something badly wrong with the spir- 
itual universe. If for God we read the universal 



1 68 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

life the principle is just the same. If you sin you 
must suffer; the punishment may be immediate or 
deferred, but every sin carries its own punishment 
wrapped up in itself. Hell is being out of harmony 
with God, and it may take time before the dreadful- 
ness of that is realised by the person guilty of it. It 
may take the whole of life to waken up to the fact 
that it is madness and folly ; the full realisation may 
only come upon a man in the hour of death. To 
sin against God is to sin against your own soul, and 
in a sense you are your own judge. A gooseberry 
bush will not get typhoid, but a human being will, 
because he is constituted for a higher kind of life 
than the gooseberry bush, and if he does not live in 
harmony with the nature of that life it is in a sense 
his own constitution that punishes him; it is just be- 
cause his physical nature is what it is that he has to 
suffer if he disregards the laws of health; those same 
laws do not apply to the gooseberry bush. And so 
with the soul. We are spiritual beings, and as spir- 
itual beings will fare accordingly as we follow the 
law of life which reveals itself in conscience and 
heart. The voice of conscience has often been called 
the voice of God, and so it is, but it is also the voice 
of one's own spiritual nature. It can be sophisti- 
cated only too easily, but if we are in earnest to find 
out what our duty is we shall never be allowed to go 
far wrong. We can defy and silence conscience, and 
in time it will cease to warn, but the inevitable awak- 



WHAT IS HELL? 169 

ening when it comes will be as terrible in its way as 
that of the man who has lived a life of fleshly self- 
indulgence and finds at length that he has contracted 
a deadly disease. In the late Robert Hugh Ben- 
son's Light Invisible there is one vivid sketch of the 
experience of a successful man of the world to whom 
this appalling revelation in the spiritual sense had 
come too late for him to be able to turn back in this 
world. The writer says : " What I gathered from 
the story was this — that he had identified himself, 
his whole will, his whole life practically, with the 
cause of Satan. I could not detect as he talked that 
he had ever seriously attempted to detach himself 
from that cause. It has been said that a saint is one 
who always chooses the better of the two courses 
open to him at every step ; so far as I could see this 
man had always chosen the worse of the two courses. 
When he had done things that you and I would think 
right, he had always done them for some bad reason. 
He had been continuously aware, too, of what was 
happening, . . . God forgive me if I was wrong — 
if I am wrong now — but this is what I think I saw. 
Out of his eyes looked a lost soul. As a symbol, 
or a sign, too, his eyes shone suddenly with that dull 
red light that you may see sometimes in a dog's eyes. 
It was the poena damni of which I had read, which 
shone there. It was true, as he had said, that he was 
seeing clearly what he had lost and would lose; it 
was the gate of heaven opening to one who could 



170 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

not enter in. It was the chink of light under the 
door to one who cried, ' Lord, Lord, open to me,' 
but through the door there came that answer, ' I 
know you not.' Ah! it was not that he had never 
known before what God was, and His service and 
love ; it was just his condemnation that he had known : 
that he had seen, not once or twice, but again and 
again the two ways, and had, not once or twice, but 
again and again chosen the worse of those two; and 
now he was powerless." 

Awful, but true — true of every one sooner or 
later who lives in deliberate defiance of what he 
knows to be the will of God, or rather of what he 
knows to be right. No man, I should think, ever 
deliberately defies God; he only goes on gratifying 
himself, choosing the worse instead of the better part, 
but it comes to the same thing in the end. It is im- 
possible to live like that and be as though one had 
not done it, and the discovery of the truth when it 
comes is hell. 

Many years ago, when the late Charles Bradlaugh 
was lecturing on the atheist platform he was tackled 
at one of his meetings in Nottingham by a young fel- 
low in the audience who objected to some of his state- 
ments, notably his remarks about hell. " I suppose," 
said Mr. Bradlaugh, " you are a believer in the bot- 
tomless pit." " Yes," was the young man's reply, 
" and so are you. I will undertake to show that you 
and every other rational being believes in the bottom- 



WHAT IS HELL? I?I 

less pit. If you see a man hardening his heart 
against good influences, stifling the reproaches of his 
better self, giving way to evil habitually, do you not 
know that he is falling into what is practically a bot- 
tomless abyss ? What is there to stop him ? Things 
he could not do without a twinge of conscience at 
first come easy to him later, and by and by he can do 
them without any remorse at all. Lower and lower 
he sinks until, humanly speaking, he is beyond re- 
demption ; nothing can alter him ; he must go on from 
bad to worse." I think I am right in saying that Mr. 
Bradlaugh instantly admitted this as true to the facts 
of life. Neither he nor his opponent, of course, 
would have insisted on the inevitableness of any such 
destiny beyond the fact that a man can become so 
depraved as to cease to be amenable to appeals to 
his better nature, which at one time could have moved 
him to repentance. What is to happen to such a 
man in the next world? What can happen but that 
when the sources of his earthly gratification are struck 
away he finds himself in conditions with which he is 
totally out of harmony and suffers accordingly? It 
is no exaggeration to say that the wrath of God and 
the love of God are the same thing viewed from op- 
posite standpoints. The wrath of God is the con- 
sistent opposition of God to sin, and what is that but 
the perfection which is love ? Put a man with a dis- 
eased eye in a room flooded with light and he will 
scream with anguish until he is shielded from the 



172 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

naked rays. The eye is made for the light, the light 
which reveals all the glory and the beauty of the 
world, but being out of harmony therewith it suffers 
unless it is darkened. So with the soul that is habitu- 
ated to evil ways. It is made for the eternal light, 
and therefore it suffers when the veil of the flesh is 
torn away and it is exposed naked to the truth. 
Logicians may cavil at this phraseology, but hardly 
at the fact behind it; the analogy between the physical 
and the spiritual experience must be pretty close in 
this as in other things. 

Is hell, then, a place or a state? I should say it 
is both, but especially the latter. Without assum- 
ing that the word is a geographical expression one 
may fairly infer from the language of Holy Scripture 
as well as from reasonable probability that there 
must be some difference in the conditions surrounding 
those who are in enjoyment of the blessedness of 
heaven and those who are in the outer darkness; they 
cannot very well be sharing the same abode. But it 
is equally reasonable to suppose that there may be 
many spheres or states in the world beyond, accord- 
ing to the stage of development the soul has reached. 
There is some indication of this in Scripture, too, as 
witness St. Paul's words about the third heaven, 
and Dante and Swedenborg have elaborated the idea 
for us extensively. 

"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," 



WHAT IS HELL? 173 

is the inscription which the grim Florentine seer im- 
agines as placed over the gates of hell, and he leads 
his readers on through cycle after cycle of terrors, 
from the outer Limbo where dwell the comparatively 
blameless unbaptised to the deepest central pit into 
which the very wickedest are flung. The materi- 
alistic conceptions of the Middle Ages are thoroughly 
well illustrated in the Inferno. Swedenborg speaks 
of the " hell " and professes actually to describe 
them from clairvoyant vision as spheres of punish- 
ment adjusted to the culpability of the souls that re- 
spectively inhabit them. This seems likely enough. 
And it should not be forgotten that the word hell in 
the Bible covers more than a place of punishment. 
It would be unprofitable to discuss it minutely here. 
Suffice it to say that it is frequently used — in fact, 
one might say mostly — as equivalent to Hades or 
Sheol, the place of departed spirits in general, and 
does not necessarily carry with it any suggestion of 
penal conditions. It is different when it is used to 
translate the word Gehenna, about which more in 
a moment. The clause in the Apostles' Creed, " He 
descended into hell," thus means that our Lord, after 
His death on Calvary, passed through the abodes of 
the dead, declaring to them — so high authorities 
state — the same gospel that He had declared on 
earth. According to Dante again, He did not take 
much hope with Him, though. Thus he makes Vir- 
gil say (Longfellow's translation) — 



174 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

" I was a novice in this state, 
When I saw hither come a Mighty One, 
With sign of victory incoronate. 
Hence he drew forth the shade of the First Parent, 
And that of his son Abel, and of Noah, 
Of Moses the lawgiver, and the obedient 
Abraham, patriarch, and David, king, 
Israel with his father and his children, 
And Rachel, for whose sake he did so much, 
And others many, and he made them blessed; 
And thou must know, that earlier than these 
Never were any human spirits saved." 

Virgil himself was in hell, be it noted, in spite of his 
virtues, if this uncompromising pupil of his is to be 
believed, and so was the whole pre-Christian human 
race, good and bad, with the above fortunate excep- 
tions. Happily, we can think better of the justice 
of God than that. 

There is a sense in which hell may begin here and 
now, when retribution follows hard upon the heels 
of wrongdoing. Heaven and hell may dwell in the 
same family circle, sit at the same table, sleep in the 
same bed. It does not matter so very much what 
your environment is as to whether you are happy or 
not. There is no much worse hell than the torture 
of remorse, for instance. As Milton has it in Par- 
adise Lost — 

"The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 

Or the immortal Omar — 

" I sent my Soul through the invisible, 
Some letter of that after-life to spell: 
And by and by my Soul returned to me, 
And answered, ' I myself am Heaven and Hell.' n 



WHAT IS HELL? 175 

But, properly speaking, the designation heaven or 
hell appertains to conditions following death, and 
strictly, even then, if one were minded to adhere 
closely to theological language, to the conditions of 
bliss or woe said to be unchangeable after the Gen- 
eral Judgment, as it is called, the consummation or 
wind-up of the order of things under which we are 
living now. But we need not dwell upon that. The 
question cf importance for us is whether the penal- 
ties upon sin which constitute hell here or hereafter 
are interminable; is there any hope of universal res- 
toration? The doctrine of an intermediate puri- 
ficatory state in which the souls of those who have 
not died in mortal sin are being cleansed from earthly 
stains, and are benefited by the prayers of the faith- 
ful on earth, is ancient and catholic and accordant to 
the feelings of most people. Few who make the 
great transition are fit either for heaven or hell, in 
the strict sense of the terms, and it is a natural thing 
to want to pray for those who have gone just as for 
those we love here. The practice of prayers for the 
dead would never have been challenged at the Ref- 
ormation but for the corruptions that had come to 
surround it at that period. But can we go further 
and say that Purgatory is the only hell, that there is 
no other? for that is what it comes to if hell is not 
to be accounted everlasting. We do not know ; there 
is always the faculty of the human will to be reckoned 
with, and its terrible power of sinking the soul into 



i 7 6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

utter depravity; who can set bounds to it? But at 
least we may say this: that there is nothing in the 
New Testament to justify any one in declaring that 
the punishment of sin is everlasting. " I am re- 
quired to believe that there is a hell," said a Jesuit 
priest to me once, " but I am not obliged to believe 
that God will put anybody in it at all, much less for 
ever." " While sin continues, hell continues," de- 
clared a well-known bishop in my presence on a pri- 
vate occasion subsequently, " and when sin stops hell 
stops." " That is heretical," I replied, smiling; " it 
is distinctly contrary to a defined dogma of the 
Church Catholic." " So it may be," was the re- 
joinder, " but it is Christian." I quite agree with 
him; he may have said it in public for aught I know; 
I rather hope so. From what I have already said 
it should be clear that it is the state the soul is in that 
makes its heaven or hell; God does not change. 
Says St. Thomas Aquinas : " An innocent soul 
would not feel the pains of hell, and a guilty soul 
could not enjoy the bliss of heaven." " Eternal " 
is not synonymous with " everlasting " ; it denotes 
quality of life, not its duration. It is what is, as op- 
posed to what seems, the reality behind all flux and 
change. Now what is, as opposed to what seems, 
the reality behind all flux and change, is just that be- 
ing of God of which I have already spoken as the 
source both of our hell and our heaven according 
to the way we come up against it. If we are out of 



WHAT IS HELL? 177 

harmony with it in any degree the result is pain; if 
we are in harmony with it the result is joy; but in 
itself it remains always the same — that is why it 
can rightly be termed eternal. The eternal fire is 
always there, always a consuming fire to sin, it is the 
eternal; but it is home, and rest, and perfect bliss to 
goodness. 

"Thou judgest us, thy purity 
Doth all our lusts condemn; 
The love that draws us nearer thee 
Is hot with wrath to them." 

This is how I understand both eternal punishment 
and eternal life; it is simply a matter of our personal 
adjustment to what is an eternal fact, that which is. 
When our Lord uttered the solemn warning about 
the worm that dieth not and the fire that is never 
quenched, He must have been thinking of something 
like this. When, in speaking of hell, He said Ge- 
henna, He may possibly have been looking at the very 
spot that supplied the name, the sinister valley of 
Hinnom, outside Jerusalem, where criminals were 
formerly stoned to death, where worms preyed, too, 
upon the putrefying corpses, and fires were kept con- 
tinually blazing to destroy the stench and burn up the 
corruption. In His vivid way He made this a figure 
of judgment to come, and every word of it is con- 
sistent with the view just expressed. St. Paul prob- 
ably echoes the same thought in the striking passage : 
" Every man's work shall be made manifest; for the 



178 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by 
fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what 
sort it is. . . . If any man's work shall be burned, 
he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet 
so as by fire," the fire that is at once wrath and love 
according to what we bring to its embrace; the fire 
that, thank God, never can be quenched, for it is 
Himself. Let us beware how we trifle with it. To 
preach the love of God as though it were nothing but 
a weak, tireless amiability is the grossest of blunders. 
Being what it is, it can do no other than scorch and 
blast the soul that is conformed to evil. " Be not 
deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man 
soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth 
to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he 
that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap 
eternal life. n 



CHAPTER XVII 

REUNION 

At the present time of almost universal mourning, 
there is one subject which in a quiet way engrosses 
attention to the exclusion of many others of minor 
moments, and that is the question as to whether and 
on what terms we may hope to rejoin those of our 
loved ones who have preceded us through the gates 
of death. One sees but little of it in the papers, 
but that is mainly because the things we talk about in 
the papers are not usually those on which we feel 
most deeply. Even the pulpit is reticent in its ref- 
erences to it. And yet one meets it again and again, 
and it is clear that people are thinking of it to a de- 
gree unprecedented. When the young and strong 
are taken away from us in such numbers as now, it 
is but natural that this should be so; we feel the pres- 
sure of the problem more than in normal time. 
When the aged enter into rest it is like the finish of 
a song, but when youth perishes in the furnace of war 
it is like an interrupted symphony and we long to 
hear it resumed. Bereaved parents, wives, sisters, 
and lovers all over our land to-day are listening wist- 
fully for some real message of comfort in this regard. 
Whether they can get it is another matter. 

i79 



180 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Does life go on or does it finish with the shock of 
death? Assuredly it goes on, but how? that is the 
point. Nothing ever dies except as that particular 
thing: it only changes its form, its mode of being. 
This is a simple fact beyond dispute; our interest is 
not in immortality as such, for any kind of life is im- 
mortal, but in whether it can be predicated of the fel- 
lowship of soul with soul. Maurice Maeterlinck 
has a striking passage in his book, Our Eternity, 
which states the issue forcibly when he points out that 
what we are really afraid of in the thought of death 
is the destruction of our identity. " It is utterly in- 
different to us that, throughout eternity, our body or 
its substance should know every joy and every glory, 
undergo the most splendid and delightful transfor- 
mations, become flower, perfume, beauty, light, air, 
star — and it is certain that it does so become, and 
that we must look for our dead not in our graveyards, 
but in space and light and life — it is likewise indif- 
ferent to us that our intelligence should expand until 
it takes part in the life of the worlds, until it under- 
stands and governs it. We are persuaded that all 
this will not affect us, will give us no pleasure, will 
not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a 
few almost always insignificant facts accompany us 
and witness those unimaginable joys." Yes, quite 
true : we do not feel that an immortality which fails 
to carry with it the continuity of individual self-con- 
sciousness is of much value. The elements compos- 



REUNION 181 

ing my body at this moment were in existence a mil- 
lion years ago and will be forming new combinations 
a million years hence, some of them, doubtless, far 
more elaborate and wonderful organisms than I have 
ever been, but they will not be me. (Forgive the 
colloquialism; it is badly wanted, and will be good 
English some day.) And what would it matter to 
me if the mysterious life that is mine now were to be 
withdrawn into the universal life out of which it 
came, and my pin-point of consciousness be merged 
in an infinite consciousness, if at the same time I lost 
all memory, all recollection of myself as myself? 
To all intents and purposes I should be as dead and 
done for as if life ended at the grave. And, more- 
over, all that to our experience at present makes life 
livable is bound up with this. If it is not spiritual 
it is worthless. As human beings we truly live in 
our relations with each other; and all the worlds 
that to us connote great, beautiful, and inspiring 
ideals are words that assume these relations. What 
meaning would honour, fidelity, tenderness, sacrifice, 
have apart from these ; and where would be our hu- 
manity without them? It would not be humanity 
at all. 

So it really comes to this, that when we talk about 
immortality we mean the persistence of the individual 
self, with its memories, loves, and fellowships. We 
do not mean simply going on; still less do we mean 
that life as a whole goes on, that the substance com- 



1 82 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

posing us goes on. We know it does, but the fact 
does not interest us much. Do we go on? — the we 
who mingle together in all those attachments, serv- 
ices, mutual associations and affinities that are the 
stuff out of which all our highest hopes and dreams 
and ends and aims are constituted. And if we in- 
dividually go on do we take up the thread of earthly 
relationship anew in the sphere beyond death, what- 
ever it may be, or is death the finish of all that? 
Shall we know and love again in some brighter world 
the people we have known and loved here? I re- 
peat that this is the only sort of immortality that is 
really worth anything; and I re-emphasise the point 
that all that is best and noblest in us looks to this 
kind of immortality or to none ; we have no other sort 
of experience that makes the prospect of an im- 
mortality denuded of these things in the least at- 
tractive. It does not follow, of course, that the 
mere fact of surviving the shock of death implies 
immortality. We might wake up on the other side 
of death and go on for awhile and then flicker out; 
it is at least conceivable. But the presumption is 
that if we — the real we — - can survive physical dis- 
solution at all we shall continue to survive for ever. 
The principal point on which we want to be convinced 
is that the death of the body is not the death of the 
man. There may be great changes, immense 
changes, in the quality of the consciousness that sur- 
vives; it may go on changing and enlarging for ages; 



REUNION 183 

but if we could really be assured that, as the Bishop 
of London once said, a man is much the same person 
five minutes after death that he was five minutes 
before, we might fairly take for granted that he will 
continue to know himself the same person for ever 
after, even if he grows to be a demi-god. It would 
be no comfort to anybody to be told that the person 
or persons he or she loved best in all the world were 
still living after death had claimed them, but they 
no longer had any knowledge or recollection of those 
who mourned their loss on earth, or, indeed, of any- 
thing that had to do with earth. They might just 
as well be extinct; if the old friendships are dead, 
they are dead too; if memory is gone, they are gone ; 
they are as completely new beings as if they had never 
existed before. 

Now, having said all this, I want to add, as clearly 
as I can, that we have the best possible ground for 
believing that the immortality I have been describing 
as alone desirable is a fact, and, therefore, that re- 
union after death is a fact too — an indefeasible fact, 
as much a fact as that I who write and those who 
read these words exist now. We shall never stop, 
and our inter-relations with other beings will never 
stop. Let no one ask me how I know this; I do 
know it, and that is all I can say. No one can ever 
absolutely reproduce for others the evidence that 
satisfies himself on the deepest things. But I hold 
that the fact of survival after death has been proved 



1 8 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

up to the hilt over and over again, and is being dem- 
onstrated still to thousands of bereaved ones, despite 
the prepossessions of this materialistic age of ours. 
And I am not thinking of the cult of necromancy 
when I say this ; it is a practice attended with grave 
dangers, as the Church has long ago recognised; but 
that communication between the living and the so- 
called dead has frequently been made and is still be- 
ing made, is to my mind beyond all doubt. Whether 
it is well that it should be habitual is another thing. 
I should question it on the ground that it is surely 
undesirable to drag our emancipated dear ones back 
into earthly conditions; far better speed them on- 
ward by our loving thoughts and prayers, and yield 
ourselves to the good influence of theirs for us. 
There is such a thing as spiritual communion, as the 
Church has always taught; it is one of the tenets of 
our faith. Why, even between beings still in the 
flesh there is often such sympathy that thoughts and 
feelings can be transmitted from one to another 
across great intervening distances. One senses what 
is happening to the other, so to speak, or is aware 
when the other is specially thinking of him or her 
and pouring warm, loyal, benevolent wishes upon 
him or her. How the knowledge of it often helps 
and sustains us through difficult and trying circum- 
stances! Many a soldier at the front to-day is not 
only the better for what he knows is reaching him 
hourly from the heart of mother or wife, but owes 



REUNION 185 

to it more than he knows. Is it going to stop if he 
gets killed? Assuredly not; it will but reach him 
more easily then, for there is no longer any fleshly 
barrier to the spiritual tide. 

And in a few short years at most we shall all have 
entered upon that higher side of life, and be learning 
lots of new things. It is probable, for instance, 
that we shall learn to transcend all imprisoning 
affections. Do my readers know what I mean? 
Love is the greatest thing in life, to be sure — the 
only thing that makes continued life desirable, as I 
have already shown — but our earthly love is a 
poor, restricted thing compared with what love might 
be in a higher state of existence. We are only able 
at present to love a very few people intensely, though 
we may be so happy in this love as to feel kind to 
everybody. But we cannot actually love everybody 
as we love our own nearest and dearest. Now, is 
it not both imaginable and desirable that, without 
ceasing to love those we love now, we might attain 
in time to a state of consciousness so much vaster and 
higher that we could love a myriad souls or more 
with the same devotion that we now give to one or 
two? In other words, would it not be a glorious 
thing to be able to love as we have always been taught 
that Christ loves, as if every soul were the only one 
in the universe, so strong would be our regard for 
that soul and so discriminating, but with an all-in- 
clusive scope and range, none omitted, none forgot- 



1 86 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

ten, none rejected or despised? That would be 
heaven indeed, a state of universal good-will, and 
therefore of a joy beyond all our present powers of 
mind to conceive. Perhaps that is why St. Paul 
speaks of it as, " to know the love of Christ which 
passeth knowledge " — that is, passeth knowledge 
now, but not always; the day will come when we shall 
get up to it in the life elysian. 

What is called natural affection may therefore 
have to become merged in something higher, but 
without being either dimmed or destroyed. I cannot 
doubt it myself. It will never become indifference ; it 
will only cease to be exclusive. And I believe, too, 
that the rather sad fact, sad from one point of view, 
which none of us can help observing, that the dead 
are soon forgotten, is more or less an illusion. It 
is a merciful thing that time does take the raw edge 
off grief, does heal the deepest wounds of the heart 
in most cases; but it is not quite what it seems. It is 
the mortal part of us that does the forgetting; the 
immortal part, the true, imperishable self, holds on 
to its own and reasserts its claim, but on newer and 
higher levels, when the body is laid aside. What 
would you say if some one you loved with the whole 
force of your nature forty years ago were to walk 
into the room? You might be overcome with de- 
light, or you may have grown so far away from that 
early stage of experience as to be utterly unmoved; 
but wait till death comes, and you will see that what 



REUNION 187 

was truly spiritual in that relationship will instantly 
leap back to its place in your soul and all else disap- 
pear with the worn-out garment of the flesh. And, 
oh, how many there are who are simply waiting for 
this great change to take place, with whom a beauti- 
ful love of early life is as fresh to-day as it ever was, 
and who are looking forward with patient eagerness 
to the everlasting morning! 

" O, thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest." 

Memories may fade, sorrow and heartbreak die 
down, familiar faces recede with the passing of the 
years, but all the precious fellowships of old will 
come back on a securer plane of possession, an alti- 
tude where there are no rival claims to be adjusted, 
no jealousies and littlenesses to be feared. 

There is a difficulty in imagining life in heaven. 
What we love, or think we love, in our friends and 
kindred is so closely interwoven with the physical 
organisation that it is no wonder we are inclined to 
identify the two. We long and yearn for the famil- 
iar associations — 

"For the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still." 

But in a world where there is no eating and drinking, 
and marrying and giving in marriage, intercourse 
must be different. Speech is a clumsy instrument at 
the best for the conveyance of ideas; and shall we 
never get closer to one another than tongue and em- 



1 88 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

brace can take us? Yea, verily, we do it even now 
in the hours when silence gives the sweetest com- 
munion — a fore-glimpse of what is to be when the 
physical medium is gone. And the most familiar 
face and form are changing before our eyes hour by 
hour; there is nothing permanent, nothing of eternal 
worth, in the purely physical; it is but as the sacra- 
ment of spirit that it has value, though that is much. 
But the essence of what we love is always invisible. 
No man has ever yet seen a soul, and it is that in- 
visible that cannot die. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 

Up to the present this country has not been hard hit 
by the war. Those who say so do not know what 
they are talking about. Mourners we have in plenty, 
and are like soon to have many more; individuals 
once prosperous have been impoverished through 
the sudden stoppage of their particular business or 
source of income owing to the diversion of the na- 
tion's energies into other channels. Most of them 
will recover in time if they can hold out, but not 
yet; and we can only marvel at the patience and self- 
control exhibited by these unfortunate ones whom 
economic disturbance has victimised; we hear almost 
nothing about them, so silent are they and so ready 
to accept the inevitable ; but they exist, and some day, 
perhaps, may become articulate. Their story is as 
well worth telling as any one else's. But on the 
whole we, as a people, have not suffered much so far, 
nothing comparable to Germany, and nothing to be 
mentioned in the same breath with little Serbia and 
helpless Armenia. While in France I frequently ex- 
pressed my astonishment at the apparent exchange 
of roles between the French and the British in the 
war zone: the former sombre and stern instead of 

189 



1 9 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

light-hearted and gay, the latter just the reverse. 
The Englishman seemed to have borrowed the 
Frenchman's characteristics for the nonce, and the 
Frenchman to be exemplifying in his own person 
what used to be said of the Englishman, that he took 
even his pleasure sadly. In seeking a reason for 
this one received several different explanations, of 
course. My own view was, and still is, that Tom- 
my's cheerfulness is part of his notion of honour; it 
is playing the game as he understands it. He is not 
enjoying his task; it would be folly to say so. It is 
too horrible and altogether dreadful for that. But 
he feels he must make the best of it, and therefore 
he must act like a sportsman even to the extent of 
keeping up his own spirits and those of his comrades 
by every means in his power, and one of the most 
potent of these is laughter and song. This, I be- 
lieve, is the sole secret of the brightness of demeanour 
we hear so much about among the troops at the 
front; it is a lesson to us at home. But I am bound 
to admit that other and less flattering accounts of it 
were given me. Some officers declared that it was 
merely due to the thickness of Tommy's head. This 
sounds insulting, but it was not meant to be; those 
who said it are admirers of Tommy and share his 
dangers and hardships daily. They only hinted at a 
certain dulness of imagination which prevents the 
average Briton from realising, as the more sensitive 
and quick-witted Frenchman is bound to do, the ter- 






IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 191 

ribleness of the task in hand. There may be some- 
thing in this, though how much it would be impos- 
sible to say. How men who have been in the 
trenches, exposed to the horrors of shell fire and, in 
the judgment of many, to the still more appalling 
horrors of bayonet fighting, not to speak of the con- 
stant rigours and miseries of life in the open under 
the prevailing weather conditions of these winter 
months, can be fairly described as failing to realise 
what is taking place I do not know. I still hold by 
my own theory of the matter. 

But this at least is true : we here by our own fire- 
sides, safely sheltered from the enemy by the guns 
of our Grand Fleet and the heroic exertions of our 
sons and brothers in France and Flanders, do not 
and cannot understand what war is like as our brave 
allies do, or as we ourselves speedily should if it were 
raging in our midst. No contrast is more striking 
to a traveller than the contrast between this side 
of the channel and the other in regard to the im- 
mediacy of war, so to speak. It was the first thing 
I noticed when I crossed last February, still more in 
July, and abundantly more in October. Here on 
the outside of life is little observable difference : there 
the difference is everywhere apparent. There is a 
different feel about France, somehow — the war is 
in the air as it certainly is not in England even now, 
after all these terrible months of bloodshed and 
strain. This, remarked the elderly head of a mil- 



1 92 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

itary hospital staff to me, is the real reason why the 
British soldier is not so grim-looking as his French 
brother-in-arms. He very soon would be, so should 
we all, if we had seen our country invaded, our 
homes knocked about, and our women maltreated as 
French people have had to see theirs ever since 
the autumn of last year. Let the Germans plant a 
couple of million of men in our home counties and 
lay our fair land waste with their usual thorough- 
ness, and there would be little disposition left for 
indulging in pleasantries of any sort. 

No, we have not been sorely hit by the war — not 
yet. One of the strangest paradoxes about this pe- 
riod of destructiveness through which we are pass- 
ing is that there is very little dire poverty about. It 
has taught me a lesson, a lesson which probably the 
workers as a class are assimilating too — namely, 
that destitution and the degradation which so gen- 
erally accompanies it could be got rid of in a month 
in time of peace if we were only in earnest to do it. 
It is caused simply by an unfair distribution of 
wealth. We always knew that, but what we did not 
know was that it could be so speedily remedied; we 
thought it would take a long time even if the nation 
were willing to tackle the problem seriously, which 
it has not yet shown any anxiety to do ; we were afraid 
of drastic experiments of a social nature, with the 
consequent displacement of capital, the shock given 
to that very delicate entity, the national credit, and 



IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 193 

so on. "Go more slowly," was the universal cry; 
" give us breathing space ; these drastic changes one 
after the other — all in the direction of making the 
rich pay more into the pockets of the poor — are 
very dangerous. You are impairing public con- 
fidence ; do wait a while before you attempt anything 
further. You are imposing a tax on industry which 
is certain to hinder productiveness. Call a halt; turn 
the present Government out — meaning the Govern- 
ment responsible for Lloyd George finance — and let 
us have one which will give us time to recover from 
the inroads it has made upon the big incomes. Old 
Age Pensions and the Insurance Act need paying for, 
and who is going to do it? Let us see whether we 
can meet this obligation before incurring any new 
ones." This was what we all thought more or less; 
we did not know how much the national resources 
could stand; we were terribly afraid of killing the 
goose that laid the golden eggs — namely, the em- 
ployer and his profits with their bearing on com- 
mercial enterprise generally. There were numerous 
experts, financial and otherwise, who assured us we 
had already done it, and that the country could never 
recover from this wild-cat legislation and the drain 
it had made upon our material reserves of all sorts. 
Politics had become class war and little else, and I 
am pretty confident that if a General Election had 
taken place before Germany struck the verdict of the 
electorate would have been in favour of putting the 



i 9 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

brake on for awhile. I know plenty of admirers of 
Mr. Asquith and his forceful Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer who thought it was time to say so. Doubt- 
less the Kaiser and his advisers were awake to this 
and shaped their policy accordingly. 

And we were wrong, the whole lot of us — Kaiser, 
German Bureau, British Tories, hesitant Liberals, 
landowners, bankers, manufacturers, shopkeepers, 
taxpayers generally, and probably the proletariat 
too. It is nothing short of amazing. Here we are 
hurling our accumulated stores of wealth into hell, 
the hell of war, and the workers as a whole were 
never so well off. We are able to pay, and we do 
pay, without complaining. We are doing it without 
suffering very greatly, without hearing the cry of 
hunger going up from our congested areas as it has 
too often done in time of peace, and without the 
slightest apprehension that we are drawing near to 
the end of our strength. We shall be able to go on 
doing it for years if need be. The savings of the 
working classes have hardly yet been touched for 
national purposes, and if report speaks true there 
has been a not too creditable increase in the purchase 
of cheap luxuries — and luxuries not commonly ac- 
counted cheap, also, such as pianos — among a sec- 
tion of these, unskilled labourers especially. They 
are not unpatriotic, but is it to be wondered at that 
they should suddenly feel themselves well-to-do and 
fail to realise that war is economic wastage as well 



IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 195 

as wholesale murder? " Three pounds a week, and 
no 'usband ! " a lady engaged in munition work is 
credited with saying. " Wy, it's 'eaven!" There 
is humour in the sentiment, one must confess, though 
it was not complimentary to the absent husband. 
There was some hard drinking in Dublin last year 
after the maintenance allowances began to be paid — 
Dublin was not the only place, by the way — and it 
is stated that some outspoken females declared they 
wished the war would go on for ever on the same 
terms; they had never had so much money to spend 
in their lives. 

We are not only squandering wealth and manhood 
in this insane business of war — though we had no 
choice in the matter but to fight or perish — not only 
destroying the slowly built up total of our national 
savings in the effort to inflict a still greater destruc- 
tion on those of the enemy, not only causing world- 
wide havoc, mourning, and woe, but we have with- 
drawn not less than four million men from productive 
occupations and set them to smash and kill instead. 
Think of it ! and then remember that these men have 
to be equipped and maintained somehow or other 
by the rest of us, and that most of them are the very 
pick of the country's early manhood. And we can 
afford to do it! We can do it and in the process 
make an end of destitution for the time being and 
secure to wage-earners a higher standard of com- 
fort than they have ever enjoyed before. Will the 



196 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

electors of Great Britain, rich and poor, try to digest 
that fact and grasp its implications? The logic of 
it is that we can, if and when we choose, get rid 
for ever of the crying disgrace of starvation and mis- 
ery at one end of the social scale and senseless osten- 
tation at the other. The thing is demonstrated now. 
When the war is over we shall have an amount of 
distress to cope with that we do not visualise at pres- 
ent, and economic problems will emerge which will 
tax our statesmanship to the utmost. We shall have 
tens of thousands of maimed and crippled soldiers 
on our hands, and a gigantic national debt on our 
backs which will be a crushing burden for generations 
to come. We shall hear of unemployment then with 
a vengeance ; and we have a convenient way, to judge 
from the precedent of former wars, of forgetting the 
debt we owe to the man who has given up his place 
in life to go and fight for us and been made incapable 
of earning his living in consequence. Perhaps that 
will not happen this time. I found, while address- 
ing soldiers' meetings in France this autumn, that 
our fighting men are quite alive to it and determined 
to prevent it if they can. Nothing roused more en- 
thusiasm in the course of our discussions than any 
expression of resolve that when the war is over no 
effort or sacrifice shall be spared in seeing that jus- 
tice is done to the claims of those who have suffered 
in our cause, not least the fathers of families who 
have been permanently invalided by what they have 



IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 197 

gone through. Again and again one met men who 
had held good, well-paid positions at home and given 
them up to go and serve in the ranks. The orderly 
who waited on me at mess on several occasions was, 
or had been, a wealthier man than any officer at the 
table. At almost any service I ever held I would be 
addressed afterwards from the floor by privates or 
non-commissioned officers whose very accent showed 
them to be men of education and good breeding. 
The army as it exists to-day is a fine, all-round lev- 
eller; a good many artificial prejudices and social 
distinctions are being swept away by the power of 
actual daily comradeship in the face of death. 
These four million citizen soldiers have votes: how 
will they use them when they come home? Is it 
conceivable that they will either forget, or allow us 
to forget, that a first charge upon the national ex- 
chequer for long to come must be the proper main- 
tenance or the reinstatement in their callings of those 
who did not wait to be fetched, but sprang to arms 
to defend their country, and have done it at a great 
cost in body and substance ? 

Let the lesson be driven well home : we can do all 
that is required if we want to do it. Behold the 
economic miracle of to-day, and consider what is 
possible to-morrow. There need never be another 
hungry mouth ; no honest man ought to have to dread 
the loss of a job or to lower his self-respect by seek- 
ing the aid of the Poor Law. It is all nonsense to 



i 9 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

say that the problem of destitution is unsolvable, or 
that our resources will not bear the institution of a 
standard living wage for everybody and not for the 
aristocracy of labour only. After the debacle of 
1 87 1 France was apparently ground to powder, her 
manhood decimated, her trade ruined, her treasury 
empty, and an enormous indemnity to pay to her 
triumphant foe. She recovered so quickly and com- 
pletely, to the surprise of everybody, that in 1875 
Bismarck, like the bully he was, wanted to hit her 
again, and would have done so but for Queen Victoria 
and the British Government. All Europe will be 
in a like position by the time the present war is over 
— Great Britain the least so probably. The indem- 
nity we shall have to pay will be to ourselves — 
namely, the capital and interest of the great war 
loans that have been successively raised. It will be 
a tremendous task to do it, and we shall have all 
our industry and commerce to organise afresh. But 
it can be done, that is the main point to keep before 
our minds. It has been done before on a sufficiently 
large scale to afford us example and encouragement. 
Let us be ready for it. Do not let us drift and mud- 
dle till the problem is upon us in an intractable form. 
If we can do what we are doing now when we are 
daily destroying more than we create, what will it 
be when we cease to destroy and begin to build up 
once more? We can do it better then and without 
risk of failure if we are careful to avoid loss of time 



IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 199 

in preparing for it. It is all a matter of organisa- 
tion and united will. 

A New Zealander was lecturing some of our Tom- 
mies on our national deficiencies. His language was 
lurid; he had been provoked thereto by some caustic 
remark made by a British officer on Australian lack 
of discipline. " Anyhow," he yelled in conclusion, 
" we do know enough to know there is a war on, 
which is more than you do in your back number of 
a country. You will wake up to it, I reckon, by the 
time it's finished with, unless we have to come over 
and hammer it into your heads. And whatever you 
do when you win " — the implication in this phrase 
surely would soothe the wounded amour propre of 
the slowest-going Briton — " be sure you make the 
Germans send over their best men to teach you how 
to feed and clothe and educate your people ; it would 
be the best indemnity you could wring out of them, 
and the only one they will be able to pay." 



CHAPTER XIX 

REORGANISATION AFTER THE WAR 

In the Illustrated Sunday Herald of January 16 ap- 
pears a friendly criticism of my article of the week 
previous. It is from the pen of Mr. James Sher- 
liker, and traverses, or professes to traverse, state- 
ments of mine in the article in question, which was 
mainly concerned with the problem of destitution and 
its relation to the war, and is reprinted as the chapter 
above. 

This criticism demonstrates a thing I have noticed 
over and over again, that few people, even among 
the educated, ever take in an argument as a whole. 
They seize on bits, often unimportant bits, and worry 
away at them without allowing for their due pro- 
portion to the rest. Generally, too, they fail to per- 
ceive that their objections in regard to these bits have 
been anticipated in the argument itself. I have had 
occasion to observe this so frequently that it is no sur- 
prise to me to find Mr. Sherliker doing it in this 
instance; I daresay I do it myself when reading or 
listening to other men's words. Perhaps, in addi- 
tion, I may be to blame for having written obscurely, 
but I don't think so; and in reading the article over 
again I see little to alter in the phrasing and noth- 

200 



REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 201 

ing in the opinions expressed. One of my fiercest 
opponents in the theological field said years ago that 
I possessed the fatal gift of lucidity — or was it the 
gift of a fatal lucidity? I forget. I believe he 
added that it was about the only gift I did possess — 
but that is neither here nor there. I took his remark 
as a compliment because he was supposed to be some- 
thing of a judge in such matters, and still is. 

But let the facts speak for themselves. Here are 
Mr. Sherliker's criticisms seriatim, and it will be 
seen that every single one of them is answered before- 
hand. There is practically no difference between us, 
and the only reason why I return to the subject is 
that I am anxious to get as many people as possible 
to consider seriously the main point of the original 
article — that the war has proved that destitution 
can be got rid of, and speedily, if we are really in 
earnest about it. And if we are not in earnest about 
it we had better look out when the war stops, for 
then the distress will be terrible. 

Mr. Sherliker: " There is poverty in this war, and 
a great deal of it. The war has increased incomes, 
I admit, but it has also increased the cost of living. 
There are hundreds of thousands of people in this 
country, pre-war widows and the like, who know 
nothing of separation allowances, but who, unfortu- 
nately, know a great deal about the extra cost of 
food. The war has brought poverty about; it has 
increased poverty." 



202 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

The article: "Individuals once prosperous have 
been impoverished through the sudden stoppage of 
their particular business or source of income owing 
to the diversion of the nation's energies into other 
channels ... we can only marvel at the patience and 
self-control exhibited by these unfortunate ones 
whom economic disturbance has victimised; we hear 
almost nothing about them, so silent are they and 
so ready to accept the inevitable; but they exist." 
" Here we are hurling our accumulated stores of 
wealth into hell, the hell of war, and the workers 
as a whole were never so well off." " We are not 
only squandering wealth and manhood in this insane 
business of war . . . but we have withdrawn not less 
than four million men from productive occupations 
and set them to smash and kill instead." 

Mr. Sherliker: " I agree with Mr. Campbell that 
there need not be hungry mouths when the war is 
over; there need not have been hungry mouths be- 
fore the war began. But when he says that no hon- 
est man ought to dread the loss of a job after peace is 
declared he tells us that he has never been out of a 
job himself, that he has never had to look for one, 
and that he knows nothing of the haunting anxiety 
as to what the morrow may bring. . . . When the 
war is ended we shall return to the old conditions — 
or worse. . . . What about when the million boys 
come home to return to their former occupations? 
What about when at least half the munition works 



REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 203 

close down? . . . Will Mr. Campbell explain why 
no honest man will then need to dread the loss of 
a job?" Evidently my critic has missed the point 
altogether here. He then goes on to point out the 
plain economic fact, as he calls it, that for a long 
time there will be more men than we can find work 
for, consequently unemployment, and probably, too, 
a fall of wages. Employers will not be able to pay 
to the State and to the wage-earners too. 

The whole purpose of the article was to show that 
this need not be. Mr. Sherliker says things will be 
again as they were before the war, and worse. Will 
they? That depends upon ourselves. From what 
we only too sadly know of our muddling, bungling 
methods as a nation they very likely will, but not 
if we prepare against it. I did not say that no hon- 
est man would need to dread the loss of a job; I say 
he ought not to have to dread it, and there is no 
need that he should. The paradox of the war is 
that what the public generally thought we could not 
do in time of peace when we were piling up wealth 
we actually have done in time of war when we are 
recklessly squandering wealth. No one can deny 
that; it is a truly marvellous thing. For the time 
being we have abolished destitution; are we going 
to let it return? Can the community afford to let 
the wasteful struggles of capital and labour con- 
tinue? Are we going to be fools enough simply to 
bring our soldiers home again and discharge them, 



20 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

while at the same moment closing down the munition 
factories, and throwing this vast mass of unorganised 
labour idle upon the market? Again I say it is not 
unlikely, judging from our previous methods; but 
cannot measures be taken beforehand to prevent it? 
They could if we would. A society already exists 
for dealing with the problem which will then be upon 
us; but what earthly use is one voluntary society 
in face of a vast, complicated issue like this? The 
whole nation should be facing it, and the best brains 
of the nation be at work upon it with Government 
authority and support behind them. If not, the suf- 
ferings that will follow upon the conclusion of peace 
will outvie those of war. 

The Lord Mayor of London has already taken 
action upon one aspect of it in calling together a 
great conference at Guildhall, representing all the 
big commercial and industrial towns, bankers and 
merchants, and employers of labour. The object of 
this gathering was to organise British trade and com- 
merce so as to prevent the enemy countries from 
gaining an undue advantage over us again in these 
respects in spite of all our fighting. This is all to 
the good; we can but rejoice that it is being thought 
of in time ; but we want more than that. We want 
a bold policy adopted with regard to labour. At the 
risk of being tedious I must remind my readers once 
more of what the war has proved. It has proved 
that in a period of waste and destruction we can 



REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 205 

suddenly afford to pay a living wage to practically 
all workers. Suddenly, remember ! All at once we 
wanted all the labour we could get, and we used it 
and paid for it at a higher rate than before the war 
began. True, the cost of living has gone up too, 
but not in the same proportion. This is only a 
personal opinion, I grant, and would take some 
proving, which I have not the means of doing at 
present; but is it not plain to everybody that there 
is not the same amount of distress about that there 
has been in winter time in former years? Mr. Sher- 
liker advises the workers to save against the hard 
times coming: are they saving? Such is not the 
evidence available. They feel more comfortably off 
than they were, and no wonder, but it is hardly to 
be expected that they should as quickly realise the 
necessity of laying by for a rainy day. They feel as 
anybody would feel when entering upon a period of 
comparative opulence after pinching, that they want 
to enjoy it. 

Now, let me repeat, if this is possible in time of 
war it should be still more possible after the war. 
The fears have been proved groundless of those who 
insisted that the social legislation of the few years 
immediately preceding the war were laying too 
heavy a burden upon our resources and would drive 
capital abroad, etc. There is a limit to driving capi- 
tal abroad. Capital is only stored-up wealth, or 
power over production; and wealth is produced from 



206 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

two things, labour and land. Unless we send old 
England itself abroad we shall not lose all our capital 
in any eventuality. What are we doing with it now? 
what have we been doing with it ever since this hor- 
rible strife began? In a few months we have flung 
away with both hands a hundred times the amount 
Mr. Lloyd George would have dared to ask for to 
put an end to destitution. It was there to throw 
away, and there is plenty still behind it. The war 
has not hit us yet as it has hit other nations; we 
scarcely know what it means as compared with any 
other belligerent. And the secret is that we are go- 
ing on producing all the time. Our mills and fac- 
tories are not idle; we are earning the wherewithal 
to exchange for the commodities necessary to feed 
and maintain our population at home and our armies 
abroad — thanks to the Fleet. We are doing this 
while employing in productive occupations only a 
tithe of the number we should in time of peace ; that 
minority, including many women, is providing what 
the rest of us live on and fight with. It must be so ; 
where else could it come from? Wealth is not 
money: it is goods. Neutral nations do not main- 
tain us out of charity; they supply what we want 
because we are able to pay for it by sending an 
equivalent in articles of value overseas. And if that 
can be done under such conditions as prevail to-day 
it could and should be done as a matter of duty and 
national well-being when all the workers are at work 



REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 207 

again and war's wastage has stopped. I will return 
to that point in a moment, for upon it everything else 
hangs : the whole question is just that of seeing that 
the workers are set to work again. 

But to illustrate what I have been saying up to 
now. Here, let us suppose, are two families settled 
in a savage country far from civilisation. They 
earn their living by trapping and shooting animals, 
and curing and sending away for sale the furs thus 
obtained. The head of the one household claims all 
the territory as having been first there, and he em- 
ploys his more lately arrived neighbour in his busi- 
ness and allows him a certain moiety of the proceeds. 
To every request by the man for more, the master 
replies that he cannot afford to give it. He will not 
even allow him plenty of ammunition wherewith to 
do some business on his own account. One day they 
are attacked by redskins, and both families are block- 
aded in the master's house. Week after week goes 
by, and by economising their supplies and using their 
powder and shot effectively they manage to come 
through safely and defeat their assailants. Then 
the employe speaks up to his superior: " See here, 
are we going back to the old condition? Before this 
murderous attack began you could not afford to give 
me anything extra either in means or profits. In the 
first half hour's fighting we blazed away more am- 
munition than I should have asked from you in a 
year; and you have maintained me and my children 



208 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

on the accumulated store of our joint labours in the 
past. Through dire necessity, and because we had 
to stick together or go under, you have distributed 
your substance freely. I did not know you had such 
a quantity by you ; neither, perhaps, did you. None 
of us have starved or been anywhere near starving, 
and yet we have been fighting instead of toiling. 
Can't you be more generous when the toiling begins 
again without being afraid that you will not have 
enough left for yourself? Make me a partner; I 
will work all the better and produce all the more." 

To make the parallel exact one only needs to sug- 
gest that the non-combatant members of that little 
garrison are able to do something to add to the 
stock of provisions while the siege lasts, and to keep 
the weapons up to the mark for their defenders. 
And here you have a faithful picture in little of what 
is taking place in this island at the present hour. 
The Germans have acted the part of redskins sure 
enough. In a suggestive article in the Daily Chron- 
icle of January 18, Mr. H. G. Wells says: " Ger- 
many is feeling the pinch of the war much more even 
than France, which is habitually parsimonious and in- 
stinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, which is 
hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has really only 
begun to feel the stress. She has probably suffered 
economically no more than have Holland or Switzer- 
land. . . . She has not even looked yet at the Ger- 
man financial expedients of a year ago." There is 



REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 209 

no more clear-headed writer on economic subjects 
living to-day than Mr. Wells, and his words carry- 
weight. It will be time enough to talk about this 
country being hard hit by the war when the cry of 
hunger begins to be heard as it already has been in 
other countries; but, please God, if we are wise it 
never will be heard here. It would be a tragedy, 
indeed, if we had to wait till after the war to hear it. 
To get back to the problem of setting the worker 
to work. Do not let us make the mistake we were 
making before the war and shout our non possumus 
before we have even tried. Here are two proposi- 
tions which I will challenge anybody to confute. 
First, every able-bodied man with two hands can be 
enabled to produce something of benefit to the com- 
munity. Secondly, there is no such thing as over- 
production, though there may be over-proportional 
production. As regards the former of these twain 
I fall back on the old commonplace — and almost 
apologise for referring to it, it is so obvious — that 
it is not production that is the matter, but distribution. 
There would be no dire poverty but for the inequi- 
table distribution of the means of life. Cure that, 
and you have cut at the root of most of our economic 
ills. As a people we may be very poor for a good 
while after the war, but nobody need be destitute. 
We shall begin to build up again from the hour peace 
is declared. I remember hearing Mr. Sidney Webb 
say once that if all property were shared up equally 



210 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

to-morrow we might still have to call ourselves poor; 
there would not be enough to make us rich all round. 
" But," he added, " destitution is curable, and with- 
out long delay." That is it. Poverty does no one 
any harm though luxury easily may; I am not at 
all sure that civilisation would not be better in a 
hundred ways if it were poorer than it is — and it is 
likely to be poor enough after the war. But poverty 
with simplicity and clean living spells happiness; des- 
titution spells misery and degradation. 

John Stuart Mill pointed out about two genera- 
tions ago that there may be real and acute distress 
in times of general prosperity owing to the shifting 
of markets or introduction of labour-saving appli- 
ances. And when that happens, he said, measures 
should be taken by the community as a whole to tide 
over the period of readjustment. Ought we not to 
be getting ready for that now by organising industry 
on a national basis without destroying individual en- 
terprise? The community is all the richer by the 
number of commodities produced at any one time so 
long as we do not go short of others that are as 
necessary or more necessary. If three-fourths of 
the workers of the world suddenly took to producing 
boots and shoes it would not be true to say that we 
had too many boots and shoes; it would only mean 
that we should each have a new pair of boots as 
often as we now have a clean pocket-handkerchief. 
But what would be disastrous would be to have three- 



REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 211 

fourths of the workers making boots and shoes if 
there were not sufficient left to grow corn. That is 
where gluts come from, and that is what wants reg- 
ulating. Too many boots and shoes to enable those 
who make them to exchange their products for corn 
— a shortage of corn — hence hunger and unemploy- 
ment. 

With all our might let us join together to set all 
idle hands going after the war, and to see to it that 
none of such labour is misapplied or ill-requited. As 
Ruskin said in Unto this Last: " Luxury is indeed 
possible in the future — innocent and requisite ; lux- 
ury for all, and by the help of all : but luxury at pres- 
ent can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the crudest 
man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat 
blindfold. Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and 
if, as yet, the light of the eye can only be through 
tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, 
go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until 
the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ's gift 
of bread and bequest of peace shall be Unto this last 
as unto thee; and when, for earth's severed multi- 
tudes of the wicked and the weary, there shall be 
holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, 
and calm economy, where the Wicked cease — not 
from trouble, but from troubling — and the Weary 
are at rest." 



CHAPTER XX 

WILL OUR CIVILISATION SURVIVE ? 

Amongst those who deserve well of their country 
at the present time the name of Mr. Arthur Balfour 
stands out prominently. Not so prominently as it 
ought by a great deal. Here is a man who led the 
House of Commons for a longer continuous period 
than any statesman since Walpole, who has held 
with distinction the highest offices under the Crown, 
including the premiership itself, who had earned and 
entered upon a period of comparative leisure and 
cultured retirement, and yet in the nation's hour of 
need places his talent and experience ungrudgingly 
at the service of the Government of the day, and 
finally takes charge of one of the most difficult and 
responsible posts in the administration of an old 
political opponent, a younger man than himself. If 
this is not admirable I do not know what is. Amid 
all the bickering and intriguing that has been going 
on since the formation of the present ministry it 
never has occurred to any one to accuse Mr. Balfour 
of self-seeking or of being animated by any other 
motive than that of doing his best to strengthen Mr. 
Asquith's hands for Britain's sake. He might very 
well have expected the highest place in a Coalition 

212 



WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 213 

Government considering his record, influence, and 
ability. But, no, he takes what is given him, and is 
content to occupy a subordinate position at a table 
where for many years he has never sat except as 
chief. Mr. Churchill's withdrawal from the Ad- 
miralty created a situation of extreme difficulty and 
tension ; Mr. Balfour calmly stepped into it although 
in his long career he had never been head of that de- 
partment before, and the whole British public heaved 
a sigh of relief when it heard that he had done so; 
the crisis was past, our naval future was safe; we 
could get back to our wrangling again without any 
fear of alarming interruptions to our favourite pas- 
time. And we have been at it ever since, hammer 
and tongs, pounding away at this man and praising 
that, pushing one up into public favour and pulling 
another down according to the prevailing mood of 
the moment, pressing new claims to the headship of 
a reconstituted Cabinet or repudiating them as the 
case may be. But no one has ever credited Mr. Bal- 
four with taking part in these squabbles. He is 
there to help, not to hinder, and when he is no longer 
wanted he will go. We all know this, and are glad 
of it. Still, we might at least remember to say so 
sometimes. 

But this is not what I set out to write just now. 
It only came up by association of ideas, so to speak. 
It was not Mr. Balfour the statesman I was thinking 
of primarily, but Mr. Balfour the philosopher and 



2i 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

man of learning; and I could not help recalling our 
debt to the one while considering the other. I was 
pondering a suggestive remark he once made in an 
address before Cambridge University — the Henry 
Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, I think it was. He 
said that we of the modern world were witnessing 
an entirely new thing in the story of human develop- 
ment. Hitherto within the period of recorded his- 
tory one civilisation had followed another, each oc- 
cupying its own special patch of the earth's surface, 
having its own distinctive characteristics, continuing 
for a certain definite period long or short, and then 
passing away to be replaced by another on different 
ground, the work of a different race, and with a dif- 
ferent destiny. But now, he pointed out, for good 
or for all we are evolving one vast, complex, world- 
wide civilisation, a civilisation which soon or late will 
gather all the peoples of the earth into its embrace. 
What then? Here is a new problem for mankind 
to solve. If this civilisation of ours perishes like 
the local ones of old, what is going to take its place? 
Where are we to look for the revivifying influence 
that, coming originally from new races, made good 
the failure of a worn-out ancient society? 

This is an impressive generalisation proceeding 
from a master mind; and it is true to the facts as 
well as the question to which they give rise, a question 
with portentous implications at the present hour, 
when civilisation seems to be doing its utmost to de- 



WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 215 

stroy itself. I met Mr. Bernard Shaw in Oxford 
Street one day last summer, and he characteristically 
accosted me thus: " Well, what do you think of civ- 
ilisation now ? Don't you think we have had about 
enough of it? But, anyhow, it doesn't seem likely 
to last long; human beings at large are working hard 
to make an end of it, and the sooner the better, I 
should say; it has been no great success. Our cussed 
race has gone mad and is committing suicide as fast 
as ever it can. It might be a mercy to shorten the 
process. You are holding Intercessory Services at 
the City Temple. I suggest that you ask Almighty 
God to throw humanity on the scrap heap." These 
were perhaps not the precise words in which Mr. 
Shaw thus pungently expressed himself; they may be 
less forceful; but they give the general sense of them, 
and I do not think he would object to my reproduc- 
ing them here. Their cynicism is only apparent, 
and represents the disappointment of idealists in gen- 
eral with the course affairs have taken in these last 
days. 

What is our civilisation intrinsically worth? 
What guarantee of permanency has it that its prede- 
cessors had not? It is a question worth looking into. 
What Mr. Balfour said about the civilisations of old 
is undeniable : they were all limited both as to race 
and to the territory occupied. I might add that they 
were limited in time succession also ; as one rose an- 
other fell, as a new one came to the birth an older 



216 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

was overthrown or sank into decay. Thus we have 
the civilisation of China, no one knows how old, but 
very ancient, practically shut up to itself, possessing 
characteristic features which distinguish it from all 
others. It reaches a certain point and then it stops; 
as far as can be ascertained it has not made the slight- 
est advance for ages. It is a case of arrested de- 
velopment, and unique at that. India has its own 
history not at all like China's. Long, long ago it 
topped a high point of excellence both materially and 
intellectually. In certain ways that attainment has 
never been surpassed; but a blight fell on it; it be- 
came moribund. What we see in India to-day, with 
its teeming millions of population, is but the ghost 
of a departed glory, a mournful decadence in the 
quality of the inheritors of an immemorial tradition. 
Babylon, that great city of the plains and seat of one 
of the most formidable empires of the ancient world 
— itself a name that has survived into our own time 
as a symbol for soulless materialism and vicious 
abundance — going back to an antiquity as remote 
as 10,000 B. c. and producing a literature and sci- 
ence the very memory of which has been lost — what 
of Babylon to-day? Our troops advancing from the 
Persian Gulf are fighting over its ruins, and many 
of them, perhaps, do not even know it. The de- 
scendants of that imperial race of a long forgotten 
world have lost all sense of continuity and become 
merged in other and younger people. We do not 



WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 217 

know where to look for them nor how to trace a link 
between them and the folk who erected the colossal 
structures — monuments, elaborate plants for irriga- 
tion and the like — that lie strewn about the plains 
of Mesopotamia. The seal of death is over every- 
thing there. One of the richest districts in the world 
in natural resources, it is now one of the poorest in 
cultivation, its inhabitants half savages. 

And so one might go on. Assyria, that land of 
fierce and ruthless warriors, the Prussia of three 
thousand years ago; Persia, with its mighty Cyrus, 
the Napoleon of his day; Egypt, that home of mys- 
tery and occult lore — what do we know about them 
all? Kings, prophets, sages they produced, men of 
the sword and men of the mind, and passed; the very 
names of most of them were writ in water. There 
is good reason to believe that many of our scientific 
inventions were anticipated in the country of the Nile 
so far back that the secret of their use was lost again 
while Europe was still primeval forest, swamp, and 
waste. Each of these imposing despotisms had its 
own particular centre and its own specific period of 
prosperity, its own unique type of race culture, and 
then it perished. Egypt alone went on and on ; there 
is a magic, a lure, an immortality about Egypt hard 
to describe ; but the Egypt of to-day is not the Egypt 
of the Pharaohs. " From the summits of the Pyra- 
mids forty centuries look down upon you," grandilo- 
quently cried Bonaparte to his soldiers. He might 



218 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

have said a hundred and not been far wrong, but 
only the shadow of that wondrous past remains, a 
shadow and a tomb. 

Greece leaped upon the stage when Egypt was 
already hoary, broke Persia's dominion, and laid 
the foundations of modern culture and refinement of 
life. Alexander's armies penetrated the Orient, 
and proved themselves invincible against the barba- 
rians of their own borders too. Where is that eager, 
buoyant Greek spirit now? Was not Byron 
right ? — 

"The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! 
Where burning Sappho loved and sung, 
Where grew the arts of war and peace, 
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! 
Eternal Summer gilds them yet, 
But all, except their sun, is set. 
'Tis something, in the dearth of fame, 
Though link'd among a fetter'd race, 
To feel at least a patriot's shame, 
Even as I sing, suffuse my face; 
For what is left the poet here? 
For Greeks a blush — for Greece a tear." 

We owe to that amazing Greece of the compara- 
tively brief classical age more than we can ever 
compute; but it is dead; it does not live in Constan- 
tine and the pusillanimous nation he rules. And 
here is a curious thing. The blind Homer, while the 
Greece we know was yet young, sang of an older and 
greater Greece, a Greece of doughty heroes and 
matchless splendours, a Greece of wealth and worth 
compared with which the Greece of his own day was 



WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 219 

rude and weak. We used to think this was a poet's 
imagination, and that there never was such a Greece. 
We were wrong. Archaeological investigation has 
rediscovered it; the spade and mattock have dug it 
up, or enough of it to tell us what it must have been. 
Homer did not exaggerate. There it was, that 
Greece of dim legend and mythic story, the Greece 
of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus — there it 
really was. It has been so completely blotted out 
by some ethnic catastrophe, some unexplained descent 
of barbarian hordes as to leave no account of itself 
behind save the vague belief in a golden age to which 
the Iliad refers. 

Then came Rome, mistress of the world, Rome 
the eternal, as all men at one time believed. For a 
few generations civilisation lay under one sceptre 
and centred in one city. The proud boast — 

"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; 
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; 
And when Rome falls — the World," 

seemed safe enough when it was first uttered. The 
Emperors were entitled " lord of the world." So 
potent was the spell cast upon all minds by this great- 
est of human institutions — Roma immortalis — 
that for centuries after the empire was dead nobody 
knew it, and people everywhere went on talking as if 
it were alive. New nations grew up inside it, and 
the proudest title their rulers could take was that of 
the old Roman Caesar. That is all " Kaiser " 



220 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

means, or " Czar " either. Every " emperor " is 
but a projection of the old Roman " Imperator," who 
was only general of the armies of a Republic. This 
is one of the little ironies of history. Rome itself is 
gone for ever, the Rome whose sway stretched from 
Spain to India, and Scotland to the Sahara. It col- 
lapsed from within before it was overthrown from 
without. 

Why then should we assume, as we almost uni- 
versally do, that our particular civilisation will last 
for ever — or, rather, as the Roman thought of the 
Coliseum, until the end of the world? It might very 
well be that we should sink back into barbarism either 
as a result of the present contest or from other 
causes. Such has happened before. When Roman 
civilisation fell the clock was put back for no less 
than a thousand years. The time was not all 
wasted; paganism had to perish that something new 
and better, something richer and more stable, might 
gradually rise upon its ruins. But one can quite un- 
derstand the pessimism and melancholy of the finer 
minds of antiquity when they saw all that was dig- 
nified and beautiful being swept under by anarchy 
and savagery. I have always felt a great sympathy 
for Julian the apostate, the emperor who strove so 
vainly to resist the triumphant advance of Chris- 
tianity. To him the new cult seemed rude, vulgar, 
ugly, and irrational compared with the venerable and 
dignified symbolism of the old Greek Pantheon it was 



WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 221 

driving out. And so it was — at the time. It has 
since gathered to itself much of the poetry and re- 
finement of the less morally exalted faiths it de- 
stroyed. What poor Julian and others who felt 
like him did not see was that it possessed a principle 
of vitality and creative energy they did not. 

Has that principle still power enough to regener- 
ate the world? We shall see. For the old, old al- 
ternative is before us : either up or down, there can 
be no standing still. It rests with ourselves to say 
which it shall be. I do not myself believe, and never 
could bring myself to believe, that the whole human 
family could fail the purpose of Almighty God and 
drop down into the Tophet of sheer jungle animal- 
ism. But we are in danger of it: that is the point. 
It is, to say the least of it, conceivable that our pres- 
ent civilisation, which has been so largely material- 
istic in spirit and aim, may go to pieces, and some- 
thing entirely new have to replace it, and that might 
take a long, long while. As it is, we have been 
pulled up sharply, and will have to look to our foun- 
dations. Will we come out of the war chastened and 
purified, or will the various belligerents be like the 
famous Kilkenny cats who fought each other tooth 
and claw till at length there was nothing left but their 
tails? What kind of a world will it be after the 
nations have stopped killing each other and begun to 
live again ? I ask very seriously, Can it be hoped for 
that we may deliberately set ourselves to create a 



222 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

higher and better type of civilisation, albeit a simpler 
and sweeter one, than that which we are breaking 
up? Perhaps; it depends mainly upon whether Ger- 
many can be compelled to learn the lesson properly. 
We are seeing over again the fighting out of an issue 
upon which hangs the future of all mankind. Ages 
ago that issue was between Carthage and Rome; to- 
day it is between Great Britain and Germany. Had 
the mighty Hannibal and his Punic warriors pre- 
vailed, a cruder, more sinister, more merciless mil- 
itary despotism would have controlled the fortunes 
of civilisation than what actually did prevail. De- 
mocracy would have been snowed under in its first 
faint attempts to assert itself, and there never would 
have been an England or a United States of America. 
Rome or Carthage, England or Prussia — which as 
a spiritual ideal? We have all heard of the famous 
Roman senator who never finished a speech, no mat- 
ter what the subject, without adding as his final word : 
" I am also of opinion that Carthage should be de- 
stroyed." It is not Germany we want to destroy 
but Prussianism, Kaiserism, with its blood-drinking 
worship of the old pagan god Thor, upon whom it 
has struck a Christian name. 

And then? Well, then let us begin again and 
make a better thing of life than we have been doing. 
That ripe and rich civilisation which immediately pre- 
ceded ours and had to die that ours might be born 
might look a finer thing than what followed it for 



WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 223 

many hundreds of years, but it was not. Its gaze 
was fixed on secular ideals and those only; and the 
civilisation that does that is doomed. Cicero was a 
cultivated gentleman who wrote with much com- 
placency and eloquence concerning man's earthly lot, 
and very vaguely concerning the mysterious beyond. 
Francis, the little poor man of Assisi, hundreds of 
years afterwards taught everybody he met to regard 
earthly possessions as nothing and the soul as every- 
thing. If Francis were invited to the Lord Mayor's 
banquet to-day, and behaved as in his own day, we 
should not know what to make of him. He would 
take a big pepperbox full of ashes in his pocket, and 
sprinkle it over the turtle soup and any other dish 
they might set before him, saying as he did so, 
" Brother ash is pure." He would not stay away 
from the feast, nor rebuke any one else for eating 
their fill; he would enjoy their company, and greet 
all and sundry with the humble, charming, childlike 
courtesy characteristic of him. But he did not be- 
lieve in glutting his appetites; metaphorically speak- 
ing, he sprinkled ashes over everything that the flesh 
took pleasure in. And he lived in heaven always. 
Hitherto the twentieth century has been with Cicero. 
God grant the rest of it may be with Francis. Cic- 
ero's world was startlingly like ours, much more so 
than any of the centuries that lie between. It had 
much the same kind of mentality and very similar 
problems. Unquestionably the ordinary man of to- 



224 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

day, whether educated or not, would feel himself 
more at home with the mind of that old world of 
long ago than with that of the people of the Middle 
Ages. We could converse with Cicero much more 
easily than with St. Francis; we should understand 
him better; he would be more our kind of man. I 
am sorry to have to admit it, but it is so. Cicero's 
utter secularity of outlook and uncertainty about the 
future life represents fairly well the average mind 
of to-day, whereas Francis is a stranger to it. We 
may rhapsodise about the latter, but we do not get 
anywhere near him ; we should probably shut him up 
in a lunatic asylum if he were going about among 
us just now as he did among his thirteenth-century 
contemporaries. Brave, mysterious, mystical Rus- 
sia would be much more likely to take him to her 
heart. Oh, I wonder — I wonder greatly — - 
whether the world after the war will have sense 
enough to shake off most of its painfully acquired 
secular wisdom, with all its direful train of results, 
and go as healthfully mad again as the primitive 
Christians and the thirteenth-century friars ■ — I won- 
der and I long. 



CHAPTER XXI 

DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY CONTRASTED. 
IS THE FORMER LESS EFFICIENT? 

It is often and quite truly said that the present war 
is largely a war of ideals, and that the cause of the 
Allies is the cause of democracy against autocracy, 
of liberty against bondage, of the reign of reason- 
ableness and good will against bullying and brute 
force. With certain allowances this statement is 
unimpeachable. The war is indeed a war of ideals; 
it would be wholly dreadful if the world were to be 
governed by the Prussian jackboot system; it is not 
too much to say that the victory of Germany would 
really mean the victory of materialism in thought 
and practice. On this side of the question the mys- 
ticism of Russia, as Stephen Graham has been show- 
ing us, is in more pronounced antagonism to the Ger- 
man spirit than is that of either England or France. 
But on the other side has to be set the fact that Rus- 
sia is as much an autocracy as Germany, though with- 
out Germany's scientific efficiency, and as much op- 
posed to popular government in every shape and 
form. Nevertheless with Russia on our side the 
triumph of our united arms will ultimately mean the 
triumph of the democratic principle, of the sover- 

225 



226 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

eignty of the people, over that of irresponsible mon- 
archical rule. This is almost inevitable; whereas 
if we lose, the anti-popular elements in the internal 
administration of the nations of Europe will be more 
deeply rooted than before. Of course we shall not 
lose, but we need to win very definitely and drastic- 
ally to break the accursed alliance between imperial- 
ism and militarism which has held mankind in dread 
for so long. 

"Before the face of God we swear: 
As life is good and sweet, 
Under the sun 

This horror shall not come again; 
Never, never again 
Shall twenty million men, 
Nor twenty, no, nor ten, 

Leave all God gave them in the hands of one — 
Leave the decision over peace and war 
To king or kaiser, president or tsar." 

I thank the American who wrote those lines. He 
knows what is essentially at stake. 

But this raises a nice point: So far, has the hour 
of trial shown that democracy is as advantageous as 
autocracy in the regulation of human affairs? Was 
it so before the war, and has it proved itself to be so 
in the war ? Is democracy as a form of government, 
as a spirit or temper dominating our social arrange- 
ments, worth conserving? Is it worth fighting and 
dying for? Here is a moot subject for inquiry. 

Let us be sure of what we mean by democracy. In 
Lincoln's famous words, it is the government of the 



DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 227 

people, by the people and for the people; but even 
so it may take many forms. Aristotle would not 
have believed it realisable in anything except a city 
state, a state of perhaps no more than thirty thou- 
sand citizens. He would have scouted the idea of 
a democracy that ran to a hundred millions as in 
the United States of America. And to him and his 
contemporaries, citizenship, democratic or otherwise, 
involved the subjection of a helot class of three or 
four times the number, who were compelled to do 
all the drudgery for the privileged citizens; he held 
that a man could not be a proper citizen and have to 
wait on himself. I wonder what our Labour M.P.'s 
would think about that. It is clear that these city 
states of old were not democratic at all in our sense 
of the word, but oligarchies. 

Our own ancient Anglo-Saxon tribes when they 
originally came to these shores were small democ- 
racies. The folk-moot was the assembly of all the 
freemen in council, the men able to bear arms. 
There were grades of rank, but all had a voice in the 
direction of communal affairs. Serfdom developed 
later, but even then the mediaeval manor was a cu- 
rious anticipation of modern communism in certain 
ways. It was a self-sufficing economic unit in which 
the agricultural lands were carefully divided up 
among the household to be maintained, and divided 
in such a way that no one held any strip in perpetuity; 
the holdings changed hands from year to year on a 



228 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

recognised system, so that the best and richest soils 
came into the possession of each family in turn. 
And every member of the little community, even the 
widow and the orphan, had a universally admitted 
right to a fair share of the produce of the harvest. 
There were bad years, years of famine and flood, but 
when they came all suffered together. This system 
had to break up in time to make way for a larger 
unity, but it seems a pity we could not get it back 
in some of its best features. It was social democ- 
racy in small. 

It was a long time before anything like a na- 
tional consciousness appeared, and longer still before 
the democratic spirit extended to it. Our ancestors 
lost the battle of Hastings and had to submit to a 
foreign prince at the head of a comparatively small 
invading army because the men of the midlands and 
the north could not grasp the fact that what happened 
to London and the south had anything to do with 
them; in fact this inability to think and act as a 
united whole has always been characteristic of our 
race and is to-day. When centralised government 
became established under kingly rule it interfered 
very little at first with local customs and methods. 
The one thing the English people would not stand 
was direct taxation. We have to stand it now with 
a vengeance. Nor did the central government con- 
sider that it was its function to see justice done as 
between man and man or even to keep the peace. It 



DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 229 

allowed private warfare to go on, and within limits 
it assumed that every individual must see to the 
avenging of his own wrongs; all the State did was 
to keep the ring, as it were, and see fair play. 
When at length it interfered more in local matters 
and was strong enough to insist on maintaining order 
and the obligation resting equally upon all individuals 
to obey the law, the question at once arose how the 
local voice was to make itself heard in the councils 
of the sovereign and his ministers. Obviously the 
nation was too big a unit to permit of all the freemen 
travelling to one central spot and taking an imme- 
diate part in the general deliberations of the legisla- 
tive authority. So the device of representation was 
hit upon, and it is an odd thing to note in these days 
that for generations the chief difficulty was to get the 
various localities to send representatives at all. 

Yet so modern democracy grew, for it should be 
observed that it is from our English institutions far 
more than from any other source that popular gov- 
ernment throughout the world has sprung. Rather 
more than a dozen years ago, when on a visit to the 
United States, I went to see Mr. Roosevelt at his 
home in Oyster Bay, and in the course of conversa- 
tion he pointed out a fact that I have never since lost 
sight of. It was this : he said that American democ- 
racy owed its origin to two main forces, that of Eng- 
lish Puritanism and that of the French essayists of 
the eighteenth century, Rousseau and his kind, who 



230 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

made the way for the great Revolution which shook 
human society to its foundations and culminated for 
a while in the military despotism of Napoleon. 
" But of the two," continued Mr. Roosevelt, " we 
owe far more to the English pietists than to the 
French idealists." I should say myself that wher- 
ever you see real parliamentary institutions at work 
on the earth to-day, coupled with the responsibility 
of the administration to the people, you see the old 
English folk-moot enlarged and extended to meet 
modern conditions. This is its genesis, this is the 
historic root from which it grew. 

In a terrible world-struggle like the present, de- 
mocracy is at a great disadvantage compared with 
autocracy. It cannot easily maintain the secrecy 
essential to vigorous and decided action, diplomatic 
or military; it would be against its principles to 
suppress the liberty of the subject as drastically as 
is now being done in enemy countries. One of our 
most cherished possessions is liberty of speech, and 
another is the right of an accused person to a fair 
trial. If either of these are suspended it can only 
be under protest and within as small limits as pos- 
sible; the German bureau knows nothing of such 
limits. Then we are apt to be insubordinate, ill-dis- 
ciplined, ineffective in our methods of organising our 
resources; it is part of the price we have to pay for 
the individual freedom of initiative, and still mo*re 
freedom of inertia, to which we have so long been ac- 



DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 231 

customed. Suppose our Government had proclaimed 
universal service the day war broke out — which, as 
we have seen, is involved in the very idea of Anglo- 
Saxon democracy and is no innovation — we should 
have been saved a world of trouble since. But it was 
not done, for the simple reason that the step seemed 
too drastic to take without the direct authority of 
Parliament, and that meant interminable talk and dis- 
cussion and more or less division of purpose. Ger- 
many was not hampered so and never would be, hence 
the German people cannot understand us and our 
ways, and mistakenly think that objection to compul- 
sion on the part of persons in this country means that 
we are half-hearted about the war. Democracy in 
America is perhaps in worse case, for it has devel- 
oped a boss control of politics which is anything but 
democratic in essence, and it is more subject to cor- 
ruption and bribery than with us. But these things, 
be it remembered, are apt in some degree to threaten 
popular government anywhere ; they can only threaten 
autocracy if the fountain-head is itself corrupt. It 
has been said, and there is some truth in it, that the 
best form of government for mankind would be a 
benevolent autocracy if we have regard to no more 
than the immediate happiness of the governed. Find 
your benevolent autocrat, endow him with all the 
wisdom and ability of the ripest statesmanship and 
the unselfishness of an angel from heaven, give him 
.unlimited scope for a few years, and then shoot him. 



232 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

For undoubtedly, as the late Mr. Gladstone warned 
us, the possession of practically unlimited political 
power always tends to demoralise. The Kaiser's 
megalomania is a good illustration of this, and so at 
the other extreme are some of the fractious strikes 
among the workers in this country since the war 
began. Democracy is always handicapped by the 
fact that although in theory it affords opportunity 
for the State to discover and use its best talent in the 
public service, in practice it tends to lower the tone 
of public life through the necessity under which 
politicians labour of conciliating an electorate which 
contains a large proportion of stupid people. 

But if our thought is fixed on something greater 
than mere immediate satisfaction, if we consider the 
training of manhood as the object of government, 
then democracy, with all its drawbacks, is preferable 
to the best autocracy imaginable. For there is 
nothing that evolves faculty and strengthens charac- 
ter so much as a sense of responsibility, and democ- 
racy encourages that. When sovereignty resides in 
the people as a whole, and not in an individual or a 
group, it must mean that each man is correspondingly 
dignified by the knowledge that he is in some degree 
arbiter of the destinies of all. By the law of gravi- 
tation the earth draws the sun as well as the sun the 
earth, and therefore every tiniest pebble on the 
earth's surface in proportion to its mass is exercising 
control upon the movements of the sun; so does 



DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 233 

every citizen exercise sovereignty in a democratic 
state, and the knowledge that he possesses such 
sovereignty should tend, on the whole, to develop a 
loftier type of character than if it were wanting. 
Men have to learn how to use liberty. Those new to 
it mostly tend to confound it with license, whereas it 
is just the opposite. Freedom is not caprice but self- 
development in society. " I believe," said the Irish- 
man, " that every man should do as he likes, and if 
a man won't do as he likes he should be made to." 
Some people's notions of freedom get no farther than 
that. Freedom to obey the law of one's own being 
is not and cannot be inconsistent with the well- 
being of society at large; for what we individually 
are we owe to society in great measure, greater prob- 
ably than we ever stop to appraise. A man brought 
up apart from ordered human society, even if he 
could survive, would be little better than a wild 
beast; his faculties would be utterly undeveloped 
except those that were purely animal. Self-realisa- 
tion is only possible within society, and therefore our 
individual liberty, to be worthy of the name, must 
never be incompatible with the liberties of others, or 
with the good of the society of which we are individu- 
ally members. As I have more than once remarked, 
perfect anarchy and perfect socialism are one and the 
same, and both represent the Christian ideal in human 
relations : it is the service which is perfect freedom. 
We are members one of another, and cannot attain 



234 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

to our full individual heritage apart from the 
whole. 

There is nothing the youth of our nation needs so 
much as discipline, and I hope the democracy of the 
future will see that it gets it. Perhaps from this 
point of view universal military service would not 
be such a bad thing, for at least it would train the 
rising generation in habits of obedience and esprit de 
corps which at present it sadly lacks. Democratise 
the service sufficiently and there would be few dangers 
attending it; we should not have to fear the domi- 
nance of a military caste. And if all civilised states 
became democracies there would be little likelihood 
of our having to fear any more wars. Democracies 
don't want wars ; they know too well who have to do 
the fighting. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 

The Bishop of London is reported to have said 
recently that he knew of many cases in which people 
had lost their faith in God and the goodness of life 
through the horrors of the world war. That may 
well be ; I know of a few myself. But I doubt very 
much whether such faith was ever strong or well 
grounded. I may be mistaken, and am far from 
feeling uncharitable in saying this, but so far as my 
experience goes I am inclined to believe that a good 
deal of the so-called loss of faith is somewhat ficti- 
tious. People who have not been in the habit of 
paying much attention to spiritual things have sud- 
denly discovered that their conventional religion has 
failed them in presence of the appalling catastrophe 
which has overwhelmed civilisation; and is it any 
wonder? So much of our religion is wholly unreal, 
a mere veneer of unreflective belief and observance 
upon a thoroughly worldly and selfish mode of life. 
Something was needed to break that up, and it has 
come with terrific force. And, let me add, I have 
come across cases of late in which not even the 
excuse of conventionality can be pleaded. Persons 
who have been frankly irreligious in practice, caring 

235 



236 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

nothing about either God or heaven, and very little 
about anything but their own gratification, are now 
loud in their protests against belief in the divine 
government of the universe. Omnipotent goodness, 
they avow, would not have permitted the present 
orgy of strife and slaughter. That is as it may be, 
but a judgment proceeding from such a source does 
not carry much weight. What does and should 
carry weight is the conviction of those who have 
hitherto done their best to live in terms of the highest 
that has been revealed to mankind, and we all know 
what that is whether we obey it or not. I have yet 
to be told of a single instance in which a man or 
woman of lofty Christian character has been deprived 
of all consolation, robbed of all hope and trust, by 
the advent of the universal calamity from which 
we are suffering. The very fact that they could be 
would be a sufficient demonstration that they had 
been looking for their good in the wrong place. 

But at the same time one does not forget that 
there are those everywhere about us who are in 
deepest sorrow and affliction, because of what is hap- 
pening, and they include some of the noblest and 
worthiest of our fellow-creatures. What comfort is 
there for them, and how are they to find it? I write 
with deep respect, not only to the mourners and the 
broken in heart, to whom the war has brought per- 
sonal loss and trouble for which there can never be 
any earthly compensation, but to those whose ideal- 



THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 237 

ism has received a shock, who have been rudely 
awakened from dreams of a better and happier state 
of human society in this world to a bitter realisation 
of the truth that the forces of evil in human nature 
itself are still too mighty to permit of such a prospect 
for ages to come. Alas, for the castles we have 
builded, the many fair hopes we have indulged of 
social and individual felicity and abounding gladness ! 
They have all been drowned in a torrent of blood. 

I am not going to try to reconcile divine goodness 
with the permission of human suffering. There is 
much that might be said on that point, but when 
we have said it all there still remains something 
unexplained, something for which no argument 
drawn from the stores of human wisdom will suffice. 
Let us look to comfort only, for it can be gained, 
without doubt. 

In the first place, let us try to grasp the fact of 
the supernatural order. Few people ever do that, 
with the consequence that we are more or less the 
victims of the fluctuations and accidents of sense. 
We attribute (in a wrong way) far too much im- 
portance to the natural order, as it is called, the plane 
of physical experience and all that depends upon it. 
But there is another order, a world invisible yet not 
far away, with values of its own quite distinct from 
those of the world we know so well, an order in which 
things are exactly what they seem, and there is 
no lack, no loss, no imperfection, but everything 



2 3 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

stands in its due relation to everything else and all is 
harmony and bliss. That order is the real, and ours 
— if it be right to call this ours any more than the 
other — is the comparatively unreal. Remember, 
I am talking about a simple fact, a fact as solid and 
substantial as Europe or America. The modern 
mind has largely lost sight of this supernatural order, 
and yet it interpenetrates the natural order and is 
influencing it all the time; in fact the natural order 
is a sort of broken reflection of the supernatural. 
Plato used to say that everything earthly was a type 
or image of something that existed ideally in heaven. 
We may call the supernatural order heaven if we like, 
provided we are careful to recognise that it is the 
real, the eternal, the all-complete of which this 
earth-world is but the shadow. The relation between 
the two is like that between a beautiful landscape 
and its blurred image in a lake. Every ripple on 
the surface of the lake disturbs and distorts the pic- 
ture of the calm serenity above, though it is closely 
related to it and affords us fleeting glimpses of what 
the higher must be. Think of this. There is a 
supernatural order, and it is the source of all our 
idealism, all our notions of goodness, truth, and 
happiness. Try to imagine a world in which nothing 
needs to be improved upon because everything is 
already exactly what it should be, a world in which 
nothing ever goes wrong, and from which nothing is 
missing that is needed for the good of its inhabitants 



THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 239 

and the satisfaction of their desires, a world in 
which by just being themselves people are giving and 
doing their best for one another, and you have the 
supernatural order. I repeat that it exists now and 
has always existed ; it does not need to be made ; from 
all eternity it is. 

Its values, as I have just indicated, are not like 
ours, though not totally unlike either. Here in the 
flesh we are deceived by appearances. A scoundrel 
like King Ferdinand of Bulgaria can make high- 
sounding professions of fidelity and honour, and 
these are accepted at their face value by the Germans 
on whose side he is fighting; though if there be a 
black-hearted rascal in existence I should think it is 
he. But we are seldom, if ever, quite sure of motives 
in one another's actions, or even in our own; there 
is a lot of specious humbug in every grade of society; 
human nature is given to pretending and being de- 
ceived. Again, we suppose the possession of external 
abundance to be desirable as well as power over our 
fellows, and these are objects we contend about and 
kill one another for. In other words, the world, 
the flesh, and the devil can supply incentives and to a 
large extent control human action ; they create values 
which we know are not the highest. But in the 
supernatural order it is different. There what we 
are is all we have, and there is perfect correspond- 
ence between the inner and the outer, between being 
and seeming. As Southey has it — 



2 4 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

"They sin who tell us Love can die; 
With earth all other passions fly, 
All others are but vanity. 
In heaven ambition cannot dwell, 
Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; 
Earthly, these passions of the earth, 
They perish where they had their birth. 
But Love is indestructible; 
Its holy flame for ever burneth; 
From heaven it came, to heaven returneth. 
Too oft on earth a troubled guest, 
At times deceived, at times opprest, 
It here is tried and purified, 
Then hath in heaven its perfect rest. 
It soweth here with toil and care; 
But the harvest time of Love is there." 

Would it not be delightful if we could get rid of all 
false values at a stroke and live for truth and good- 
ness alone ? To do that is to live in the supernatural 
order, the spiritual order, and in so far as we even 
try to do it we are living in and by that order now, 
and will wake up to it by and by when we pass 
through the gates of death. 

Let me be careful here not to mislead any one into 
the heresy of supposing that the natural order is 
the seat of evil and the supernatural that of good. 
It is not so. And our hope is that one day the lower 
will be so entirely conformed to the higher, earth 
be so invaded and possessed by heaven, that all our 
troubles will disappear. That will be the fulfilment 
of the petition in the Lord's Prayer: Thy will be 
done on earth as it is in heaven. All I am insisting 
upon at the moment is the reality of the supernatural 



THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 241 

order. We ought to be consciously and consistently 
living in it and for it. 

And then what follows? Why, this: In perfect 
being is all having. That sounds a strange phrase, 
but I do not know what to substitute for it. I mean 
that when we are what we ought to be we shall, in 
virtue of that very fact, come into possession of 
everything we ought to have. Not in this world 
probably. Here in the natural order — disorder 
would be a better name for it — the noblest are as 
liable to pain and loss as the rest of mankind. Bel- 
gian nuns were violated, priests were shot for carry- 
ing letters from dying men to their relatives, heroic 
and self-sacrificing men and women lost every stick 
and stone of their possessions and were driven home- 
less out into the world. I am daily in receipt of the 
most pathetic communications from English mothers 
who wonder if I could help them find out anything 
about their boys at the front who have not been 
heard of for a considerable time. Nothing more 
moving has ever come my way than some of the 
descriptions these good women give of their lost ones. 
One can see how beautiful they were in their eyes, 
and how fine in character too. " Heaven without 
him would be no heaven to me," is a not infrequent 
observation of mother or wife, and I can well believe 
it. Consider all the sorrow thus pitifully expressed 
or held in check by hope and longing. If I had no 



242 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

word for such as these I think I would never dare 
speak in public or to write again. But here is the 
word, and it is not mine only; it is the promise of 
Him in whom the supernatural order became vocal 
once for all. " Not as the world giveth, give I unto 
you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it 
be afraid." What is yours you shall have, and you 
shall have it all. You shall have it because you have 
the capacity for it and not otherwise ; you shall have 
it because of what you are. We have to get up to 
the highest level on which to possess, and then — 
it is the law of the supernatural order — we possess 
in a perfection of which nothing can ever rob us. 
We learn, as Whittier says — 

" The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 
That life is ever lord of death, 
And love can never lose its own." 

Or as John Burroughs puts it in the simple little poem 
he entitles " Waiting " — 

" Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; 
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, 
For lo! my own shall come to me. 
I stay my haste, I make delays, 
For what avails this eager pace? 
I stand amid the eternal ways, 
And what is mine shall know my face." 

If you love with a pure, unselfish love ; or if you are 
living, not simply for the amount of wealth you can 
heap together, or the amount of sensuous pleasure 
you can wring out of existence, or for any of the 



THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 243 

other things that the world counts desirable, but for 
exalted spiritual ideals; in other words, if you are 
living for the values of the supernatural order, you 
can no more be kept out of your heritage than the 
summer could be stopped from coming by Act of 
Parliament. Wait in quietness and confidence, and 
you will see. The span of human life is not long at 
the longest. 

Moreover, you can know this as you go along. 
One of the most wonderful things in life is the way 
in which comfort comes to the heart that is stayed 
upon the highest. Despair and unselfishness are 
mutually incompatible. Viewing a disaster before- 
hand you may say you could not bear it, that nothing 
would be left for you but absolute, unrelieved black- 
ness of misery if it befell; but when it actually comes, 
dreadful as it may seem and terribly as it may hurt, 
if you have been trying to meet it on the very highest 
level of courage and faith, something — call it by 
what name you like — presently invades your soul 
and gives you peace and assurance of coming good. 
'Tis a miracle, but true. And almost always a sur- 
prise. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

KING OF ENGLAND 

A few weeks after the war broke out I happened 
to be in a certain London club and was shown one of 
the club curios, a book in which bets were registered 
between members, dating back to early Georgian 
times and containing the names of not a few men 
famous in our island story. But what struck me 
most in looking through that book was an entry 
only a few days old. It ran somewhat as follows : 
11 Mr. so-and-so bets Lord somebody else (I don't 
remember what amount) that as a consequence of 
the present war there will not be a crowned head 
left in Europe twenty years hence except the King 
of England." This was an arresting sentence, not 
because of the bet — gambling is one of the greatest 
evils of the age — but because of the significance of 
the assumption made by both parties to the wager. 
The peer evidently doubted the disappearance of 
reigning royalty; the commoner was sure of it; but 
both agreed, so I was given to understand, that in 
any eventuality British monarchy would survive. 
All other thrones may be overturned, but that of 
England stands for ever. It will be interesting to 
see the result of that bet if we live long enough. 

244 



KING OF ENGLAND 245 

But why this confidence in the stability of our 
monarchical institutions as contrasted with those of 
any other country? Well, the difference mainly re- 
sides in the quality of English kingship ; there is no 
other quite like it, and most others are very unlike 
it. In a memorable speech some years back, Mr. 
Churchill spoke of our British royal house as the 
most ancient, the most glorious, and the most securely 
rooted in the affections of the people of any in the 
world. There was not another, he declared, that 
would not be proud to aspire to an alliance with it, 
Just so: English monarchy was venerable ages be- 
fore that of Prussia existed. When the greater 
part of Europe was comprehended within the bounds 
of the mediaeval Roman empire, England stood apart 
and independent with its own race of kings. The 
blood of Alfred flows in. the veins of George V; I 
could trace the descent myself at a moment's notice; 
it has never been interrupted, notwithstanding the 
changes from one branch of royalty to another at 
successive crises in the history of the crown. The 
Hohenzollerns are of yesterday, and act like it; they 
have all the characteristics of the parvenu. Even 
the Hapsburgs, a far older and more illustrious stock, 
are hundreds of years junior — as sceptred sover- 
eigns — to the royalty of England. The dukedom 
of Austria was a small affair compared with the 
dominions of our Richard the lion-hearted at the 
time of the third crusade, though every schoolboy 



246 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

knows of the treacherous manner in which duke 
dared to lay violent hands upon king and put him in 
ward till his English subjects ransomed him. Why, 
even then English monarchy was between three and 
four hundred years old — I mean the monarchy 
of England as contrasted with the tiny county king- 
doms of which it was formerly made up. Its Anglo- 
Saxon rulers, as their coinage shows, often called 
themselves " Basileus " in imitation of the style of 
the Eastern emperors, and no doubt as a reminder to 
the German descendants of Charlemagne in the West 
that they considered themselves of more ancient 
lineage than these, and owed no allegiance to the 
pseudo-Roman empire — and which was not Roman 
at all, but Teuton — which Charlemagne had pro- 
fessed to revive. The gimcrack Austrian empire 
of to-day is what remains of this Roman empire of 
the West of long ago, and when the ancestor of the 
present Francis Joseph resigned his crown to Napo- 
leon in 1806 after the battle of Austerlitz he actually 
forgot who he was supposed to be, head of the Holy 
Roman empire, and described himself as — well — 
what Francis Joseph is content to be now. But the 
monarchy of England which overthrew Napoleon a 
few years later at Waterloo was the same monarchy 
that it had been without a break for over a thousand 
years, and its princes were, as they still are, scions 
of the same stock, the pedigree full and complete, 
that had filled the throne of England from the days 



KING OF ENGLAND 247 

of Egbert, save for such few interludes as those of 
Harold, William the Conqueror, and Cromwell, the 
old royal race going on all the time and resuming 
possession after every such hiatus. With a record 
like that, are we likely to be in a hurry to change or 
to pay much respect to the mushroom kings and em- 
perors of the Continent? 

There are peculiar features in this monarchy of 
ours too. No other race has them. Our very word 
" king " is the old Anglo-Saxon " cyning," at once 
son and head of the " kin " or family or folk. We 
are the folk, and our kingship is the centre and sym- 
bol of our national unity. King does not mean ruler 
with us. The Latin " Rex " means that, and that is 
what sovereignty usually means; it is what " Kaiser " 
means as all the world only too sadly knows. But 
our king is simply the head of the folk, the centre of 
the family, the people of one blood and speech. He 
is a freeman among freemen, and loyalty to the 
throne means loyalty to home and all that the word 
stands for. The territorial title is of later date than 
the kingship itself. Not " king of England," but 
" king of the English " is the older and truer desig- 
nation. " King of the British race at home and be- 
yond the seas " would accurately describe King 
George's position to-day, to-day of all days when the 
men of the folk are hurrying from the ends of the 
earth to draw their sword for the motherland and 
the brood she bore. Great Britain and Greater 



248 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Britain throughout the world represent a democratic 
ideal as old as our race itself. We could not be 
made into anything like what Germany is, for we 
have never been that in our whole history; it is 
foreign to our genius as a people. The difference 
is observable as far back as the days when the for- 
bears of both races were savages pure and simple. 
The Anglo-Saxon lived along the foreshores of the 
North Sea; the High German, as he is usually called, 
dwelt in the forests of the Fatherland. The Anglo- 
Saxon never could be disciplined; the High German 
could and can. The Anglo-Saxon moved in groups 
and units, the High German in platoons. The 
former had the defects of his qualities; he trusted 
little to organisation and much to individual initia- 
tive; adventure was in his blood and the sea his 
natural element. He began his career in history as 
a pirate, but soon outgrew it; the German, on the 
other hand, is clumsily and brutally beginning it. Is 
it not curious, this ages-long distinctiveness in the 
characteristics of the two peoples? And it is be- 
cause ours are what they are, and always have been, 
that English kingship is what it is. It is we who 
have taught democracy to mankind, and it is no ex- 
aggeration to say that at this moment the only true 
democracies on the face of the globe are those of 
the English-speaking race. The British Islands are 
a republic with an hereditary chief magistrate, our 
king, and that is the secret both of the stability of our 



KING OF ENGLAND 249 

institutions and of the fact that we have more indi- 
vidual liberty than any other state in the world ex- 
cept those to which ours has given birth. And ours 
is a republic which we don't want altered in the sense 
of having an elected President; we are better as we 
are. There are no republicans in this country — 
theoretical ones I mean — for the simple reason that 
England as England began a republic and will con- 
tinue a republic to the end, with one princely family 
in the highest place of honour. There used to be 
republicans, aggressive ones, in the years immediately 
preceding the accession of Queen Victoria, and these 
only existed because the crown had ceased to com- 
mand respect owing to the moral deficiencies of those 
who wore it; there have been none since, and are 
never likely to be again, for our present king and 
queen take the highest view of their duties and re- 
sponsibilities and have set a standard in this respect 
from which it will be difficult if not impossible to 
decline. The gibe of the earlier years of the nine- 
teenth century has lost its point — 

" George the first a fool was reckoned, 
A greater still was George the second; 
But of the three, so I have heard, 
The greatest fool was George the third. 
When George the fourth to hell descended, 
Thanks be to God the Georges ended." 

Incidentally it may be remarked that our English 
word " queen " only means wife or mother, the first 
wife, the highest mother of the folk. And surely 



250 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Queen Mary is exactly that. It is not as the fore- 
most lady in the land that we think of her primarily, 
though she is that in virtue of her exalted station, 
but as the wife and mother to whose example all 
British wives and mothers may safely look. Thank 
heaven, it is not as a leader of society or of fashion 
in dress that she yields her principal influence, but 
as what her regal designation historically imports, 
" quen " or queen of the family, the household, the 
kin, the world-spread folk of our name and race. 
And how many people know that English kingship 
is not strictly hereditary but elective? We need not 
even choose our king from the royal line. Once at 
least our fathers chose a simple eorl or thegn from 
amongst the nobility, if that be the word to use. We 
have never had a " noblesse " in England as on the 
Continent, a privileged order absolutely separate 
from the commonalty, and we may be thankful for 
that too. Harold was chosen king because we 
needed a strong man to resist foreign invasion. 
Again and again we have set aside the eldest son of 
the reigning or deposed monarch — for we have not 
hesitated to depose our kings on occasion — and 
turned to a younger branch of the family. If hered- 
itary right were strictly adhered to I suppose that 
delectable person Rupprecht of Bavaria, one of the 
most vicious haters of everything English, fighting 
against us at the present time, ought to be allowed to 



KING OF ENGLAND 251 

displace King George. It is absolutely funny to 
think that a Jacobite society still exists in England, 
and religiously decorated the statue of Charles I on 
the 30th of January, the anniversary of that un- 
fortunate prince's execution, which if logical con- 
sistency means anything would like to send our reign- 
ing family packing and crown Ruppecht in West- 
minster Abbey with the Kaiser assisting! No, 
thanks ; the wildest legitimist would draw the line at 
that, I should imagine. Our present king reigns by 
popular consent and not otherwise; and what else 
does President Wilson do? There is an element in 
the coronation ceremony at Westminster which is a 
reminder of this. I mean the point at which the ap- 
peal is made to the people to say whether they accept 
the newly consecrated prince for their king, and they 
reply by acclamation. 

Another thing I might mention at this point is 
that there is a certain sense in which our king is a 
priest. He is solemnly appointed to his high office 
by a sacramental act in recognition of the spiritual 
quality of the functions he has to discharge. He 
is literally " the Lord's anointed." He is as truly 
a chosen minister of Christ as any man dedicated to 
the service of the altar. Thus in a very real sense 
he does reign jure divino, and I should be sorry to 
think he did not. It would be a bad thing for Eng- 
land and the world if the crown as the centre of our 



252 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

national life were regarded as having no direct rela- 
tion to Almighty God. As Shakespeare has it in 
Richard II — 

" Not all the water in the rough rude sea 
Can wash the balm from an anointed king: 
The breath of worldly men cannot depose 
The deputy elected by the Lord." 

Where does Scotland come in? — some one may 
ask. Where does Scotland not come in? I should 
like to know. A complacently ignorant English 
female exasperated me once by remarking that she 
could not see why Ireland should not accept our 
sovereigns as submissively as Scotland had done. 
" It was the other way about; you accepted Scot- 
land's," I replied. But she shook her head with a 
superior smile as of one who knew; it made me want 
to throw a book at her. And yet in a way she was 
right. That shrewd old schemer, Henry VII, knew 
what he was about when he married his daughter to 
the Scottish king. Courtiers remonstrated that it 
might result in a Scottish dynasty coming to occupy 
the English throne. " The stronger will draw the 
weaker,'' said Henry; and so it has proved. It is 
said that there are more Scotsmen to-day in London 
than in Edinburgh, so perhaps there is some force 
in the sly taunt often levelled at them, that Scotland 
is the finest country in the world to live out of, 
judging by the way its sons praise it and come south 
to push their fortunes. Anyhow, this royal mar- 



KING OF ENGLAND 253 

riage united the two countries and also forged an- 
other link with our ancient Anglo-Saxon royal house 
which had married into that of Scotland. 

It gave us the Stuarts, too, that most romantic 
and unfortunate of royal races. And here let me 
conclude with a fact to which reference is scarcely 
ever made. The last representative of the Stuarts 
in the direct line, Henry Cardinal of York, lived 
till some years after the battle of Waterloo in re- 
ceipt of a pension of £2000 a year from the British 
Government. He was the brother of Bonnie Prince 
Charlie. And in St. Peter's at Rome to-day the in- 
terested traveller may notice a tablet inscribed to the 
memory of British princes not named as such in our 
history school books — " James the Third, Charles 
the Third and Henry the Ninth, kings of England." 



CHAPTER XXIV 

GERMAN COMFORT: TWO GREAT MEN CONTRASTED 

The grand old man of science in Germany is Pro- 
fessor Haeckel, and he has many admirers in this 
country and throughout the world notwithstanding 
the war. It is impossible to withhold a tribute of 
respect from the vigorous worker, well over eighty 
years of age, who has just issued one more book on 
the fundamental themes which occupy all minds — 
namely life, death, and religion. We also had a 
grand old man of science till the other day — Alfred 
Russel Wallace. He lived to be ninety, and retained 
his mental fecundity and alertness to the end. His 
name takes us back a long way too. He was one of 
the greatest figures of the nineteenth century, con- 
temporary with Darwin and co-discoverer with him 
of the theory of Natural Selection, otherwise the 
doctrine of evolution, with which Darwin's name will 
be specially associated for all time to come. Do my 
younger readers realise what an epoch-making event 
the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species was? 
It revolutionised the mental outlook of the entire 
civilised world. It is not too much to say that it 
had far more effect upon religious thought, for in- 
stance, than Galileo's famous discovery (or re-dis- 

254 



GERMAN COMFORT 255 

covery) of the fact that the earth is a satellite of the 
sun instead of the other way round. What a hubbub 
there was, to be sure ! — I mean about Darwin's 
book and its implications. Fierce conflict at once be- 
gan and went on for many years between the cham- 
pions of orthodox religion and the aggressive pio- 
neers of the new scientific view of the universe and 
its history. Thousands of pulpits thundered against 
Darwin and his conclusions. The preachers and 
theologians could not treat him as the Roman In- 
quisitors treated Galileo, but if he had been the devil 
himself they could not have cursed him more thor- 
oughly. And now this period of controversy is all 
but forgotten; it seems to us who read about it to 
belong to some remote age. Religion, like every- 
thing else, has adjusted itself to the new conditions, 
finding they were not so very dreadful, after all. 
Everybody believes in evolution more or less without 
necessarily disbelieving in the supernatural and di- 
vine. And only to think ! — the man who to a great 
extent was the cause of this upheaval in ideas was 
still living and active among us till just before the 
war. Wallace did one of the finest and most gener- 
ous things ever known in the history of new discov- 
eries. He withheld his own treatise (which would 
otherwise have appeared simultaneously with Dar- 
win's) from the public on the ground that Darwin 
deserved the full credit for the results attained owing 
to the greater thoroughness of his research work. 



256 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

Wallace had arrived at the same results independ- 
ently. 

But I am digressing. What I really wanted to 
point out was that greatest forward leap of science 
in the Victorian age was due not to Germans but to 
Britons. Darwin and Wallace made Haeckel pos- 
sible. It is worth while remembering this now that 
such prodigious and arrogant claims are being made 
on behalf of German efficiency in all fields of human 
knowledge and enterprise. To read what is being 
written in the German Press, one would never gather 
that the be-spectacled professors who are so busily 
grubbing away in their laboratories in the endeavour 
to invent something still more diabolical than poison 
gas wherewith to discomfit the enemies of the Father- 
land owed the original stimulus, of which they are 
making such evil use, not to their own savants but 
to ours. They are good copiers but bad originators. 

And nothing could well be more striking than the 
contrast between Haeckel and Wallace in regard to 
their outlook upon life as a whole. A friend of 
mine, himself one of the most eminent of living 
scientific men, tells me that on the last occasion when 
he went to see Wallace, which was not long before 
the veteran passed away, he found him full of noble 
enthusiasm concerning the future. It was almost 
awe-inspiring, said my informant, to gaze upon the 
lighted face of the aged saint, for such he truly was, 
and hear him reaffirming with the most earnest 



GERMAN COMFORT 257 

conviction his belief in the greatness of human des- 
tiny in this world and worlds beyond, his assurance 
of personal immortality and of all the wonders that 
had yet to be revealed to the ascending soul on both 
sides of the tomb. Glory upon glory, he declared, 
awaits our growing race ; life upon life, triumph upon 
triumph, joy upon joy. 

Haeckel's swan song, on the other hand, is of the 
saddest. He interprets the present and depicts the 
future in the gloomiest and most sombre terms, and 
even when he offers comfort and some measure of 
compensation for the collapse and disappearance of 
ancient ideals his words are more like a cry of de- 
spair. Most of us remember the sensation caused 
by his Riddle of the Universe, published a decade or 
more ago, and translated into most European lan- 
guages, including our own. That book exercised a 
wide and baleful influence upon many who did not 
know that science as a whole had already passed be- 
yond the point indicated in its pages. Its author 
avowed himself an uncompromising materialist, and 
stated that God, Freedom, and Immortality were the 
three great buttresses of superstition which science 
must make it her business to destroy. He certainly 
did his best to destroy them; and now he is at it 
again, this time provoked thereto by the horrors of 
the world war. The war, he says, has got rid of 
religion for ever by reducing to an absurdity its doc- 
trine of divine providence. In view of the deaths of 



258 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

such vast masses of people on the battlefield, in the 
trenches, by aircraft, warships, submarines, in hos- 
pitals and prison camps, all of them the victims 
of blind chance, others spared by the same blind 
chance, the foolishness of believing that the fate of 
individuals as of the whole race is in the hands of 
an omnipotent Being of benevolent purposes has 
surely become apparent even to the most ordinary 
intelligence. As for Christianity in particular, it is 
put more completely out of court than almost any 
other form of faith. The war has made an end of 
the principle of loving one's neighbour as oneself, 
and demonstrated the utter futility of pacifism; they 
are seen to be nothing more than a mockery, and we 
had best have done with them forthwith. How typ- 
ically Prussian! Haeckel was born in Potsdam, be 
it noted, and apparently has never got very far away 
from it. Shade of Wallace, with your glowing so- 
licitude for the helpless and down-trodden, and your 
unquenchable faith in the essential goodness of the 
human heart, what think you of this as the last word 
of science upon all idealism? 

What compensation, then, does the famous Ger- 
man professor hold out for what he thus ruthlessly 
sweeps away? Here it is : We are to be resigned to 
our lot, to stop deceiving ourselves as to the beauty 
and meaningfulness of life. Life has no meaning, 
he maintains, and is certainly not beautiful; let us 
cease to expect anything from it beyond what we al- 



GERMAN COMFORT 259 

ready only too sadly know. We must have " brave 
devotion to the Unavoidable," " the knowledge and 
recognition of the eternity and indestructibility of the 
Cosmos and of the courses of Nature in which the 
individual unceasingly appears and disappears in or- 
der to make way for new forms and new modes of 
unending Substance." " What an inexhaustible 
treasure-house of most noble enjoyment," he con- 
tinues, " do these countless wonders of an eternal 
process offer to the thinking man of Kultur ! " This, 
says a reviewer, is the concluding sentence in a book 
" which will bring but scant consolation to the many 
who regard Ernst Haeckel as their teacher and 
prophet." 

Scant consolation indeed! I should like to know 
what the weeping widows and bereaved mothers of 
Germany get out of it as they think of their husbands 
and sons sacrificed to their rulers' wicked lust of 
power. It is all in keeping with the order which 
we are told is being issued and enforced from Berlin: 
" No mourning to be worn, and no sad faces to be 
shown in the streets ! " Quite so ; how should there 
be? Will not these fortunate survivors be able to 
contemplate with joy the fact that their dead have 
been blotted out " to make way for new forms and 
modes of unending Substance " ? — which, we may 
assume, will before long have the German eagle uni- 
versally stamped upon it. What an inspiring pros- 
pect for the relatives of those whom Haeckel's cal- 



26o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

lous countrymen have just drowned in the Lusitania! 
And, mark me, the spirit which produces this philos- 
ophy governs also this vile deed. It is the ghast- 
liest travesty of a faith that ever was given to the 
world. 

"Great God! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." 

One of the most puzzling things to me about a 
certain form of mentality which has its representa- 
tives in this country as well as in Germany, is the 
earnestness with which it preaches despair. I sup- 
pose the people who are possessed of it are trying 
their best to be honest with life and not to allow 
themselves or others to be cheated with false hopes. 
But why such proselytising zeal? One would think 
they had good news to impart instead of bad, so 
eager and tireless are they in exhorting us to forego 
all brightness of outlook, all faith in ultimate good. 
It reminds one of the sinister advice of the foul 
fiend in W. B. Yeats's Countess Cathleen, who was 
trying to persuade his victim to sell her soul to buy 
bread for the starving in the wretched world where 
she lived and suffered. As with some among our- 
selves it was the spectacle of human woe that made 
Cathleen, noble in purpose but bereft of hope, think 
of driving a bargain with the powers of hell. Thus 
spake her tempter : — ■ 



GERMAN COMFORT 261 

"There is a kind of joy- 
In casting hope away, in losing joy, 
In ceasing all resistance, in at last 
Opening one's arms to the eternal flames, 
In casting all sails out upon the wind: 
To this — full of the gaiety of the lost — 
Would all folk hurry if your gold were gone." 

Strange ! This is undoubtedly the mood of not a 
few people at the present time. There is a certain 
relief sometimes in letting go, as it were, giving up, 
allowing misfortune to do its worst, refusing to be- 
lieve any longer in possible alleviations or anodynes 
for incurable grief. A kind of rest may be attained 
in the very midst of hopelessness by this method, but 
it is the rest of death. Neither man nor nation can 
adopt it without being to all intents and purposes 
finished with. Wallace or Haeckel, which shall it 
be? Neither could claim to know much more than 
the other about the essential facts of existence, but 
how diametrically opposed are their deductions from 
them! Mere cleverness is no passport to eternal 
truth; the highest discloses itself rather to a certain 
quality of soul, the teachable, tender and unassum- 
ing. " I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and 
earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise 
and understanding, and hast revealed them unto 
babes." None who has ever spoken with mortal 
tongue could speak with such authority as He whose 
words these are, and none has cast such a spell over 
wistful, troubled minds. Our disillusioned, blood- 



262 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

stained age needs to hear them anew. There are 
two modes of resignation to the ills of life. The 
one admits the mastery of hell: the other waits the 
victory of heaven. Therefore I would say to all who 
care to listen : Do not lightly barter a beautiful hope 
for a mocking nightmare. They are deceived and 
deceivers who tell you they have any better reason 
for declaring that the last word is with evil than the 
blessed saints have for knowing it to be with good. 
Live as the saints have lived and you shall know for 
yourself, for they one and all speak with the same 
tongue, and none of them has ever been afraid of 
the worst that earth had to show. It is not true, 
it is the very opposite of the truth, that the war has 
done anything whatever to weaken, much less destroy 
our confidence in the spiritual background of life. 
All the baffling problems were here before in their 
fulness that are here now. Death was just as in- 
evitable, and we have all got to face it just the same 
as if there had been no war at all. Why in the name 
of common sense people should think that because the 
dread activities of death have been dramatically 
crowded into a few months, for a few hundred 
thousand people out of the billions on the earth's 
surface, instead of being spread over as many years, 
therefore the consolations of faith have failed, it 
would be hard to say. What was true before is 
true still, and as dependable. The pains we endure 
one by one, and brief at the longest, are no disproof 



GERMAN COMFORT 263 

of divine benevolence. On the contrary, if we had 
but eyes to see and ears to hear, they are the means 
to blessedness, the discords that imply supernal har- 
monies. It is not what the world suffers that should 
lead men to doubt God, but what the world ignores, 
despises, or betrays of what it dare not deny to be 
highest and best if it could but attain to it. We are 
like dreamers tossing in uneasy slumber: and the 
morning is at hand. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE UNCAUSED CAUSE: THE MYSTERY OF 
GOD AND MAN 

Occasionally a point is raised in a letter which 
strikes me as of more than merely personal interest, 
and such is the case with one which lies before me 
at this moment. It may be summarised briefly thus : 
A spiritual view of life, such as one tries to advocate 
from week to week even in the treatment of a secular 
subject in the press, involves in one form or another 
belief in God; and the great difficulty which most 
people feel about belief in God is of imagining a 
Being of limitless intelligence and power existing 
right away at the beginning of things without a 
maker and without having to grow, develop, or at- 
tain — in fact, all complete and perfect from the 
first. This, says one of my correspondents, is abso- 
lutely inconceivable ; it does violence to all our expe- 
rience and ways of thinking. We have to struggle 
up to what we are ; so has everything else that lives ; 
but here apparently is a Person, like ourselves but 
immeasurably greater, who has had no such struggle 
to go through: He just is. Neither in goodness, 
wisdom, nor any other attribute has He had to ac- 
quire anything. It has taken man a millon years to 

264 



THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 265 

learn to do things which God is supposed to have 
been able to do without any learning from the foun- 
dation of the world. How could such a thing be ? 
There He is; where did He come from? A cause- 
less cause, how can we account for Him? 

This, crudely put, appears to be a perplexity to 
many minds ; and in mentioning it here I am far from 
wishing to enter upon a course of religious apolo- 
getic. My only object is to show those who feel 
it that the problem arises from our own limitations 
and applies quite as much to our own being as to that 
of the Deity; that there are plenty of things we have 
to admit as facts without being able to understand 
them; and that to those who really want to believe 
in the innate spirituality of existence there is as 
thoroughly reliable evidence for what one may call 
the fact of God as for the fact of man or the fact 
of the universe itself. I pass over, as not immedi- 
ately bearing upon the issue, the far more commonly 
stated difficulty of the silence of God in presence of 
human woe or the consistency of divine benevolence 
with such an awful catastrophe as the present world 
war. Let us stick to the one point before us. If 
that could be settled, perhaps the others would be by 
implication. I will only remark in passing that to 
the highest human perception God is never silent 
and that His benevolence is never more clearly mani- 
fested than in the very midst of pain and death. If 
there is one special lesson which this Lenten season, 



266 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

with its many reminders of the cross and passion, 
is meant to teach us, surely it is that. 

I admit the mystery of the being of God, a mystery 
utterly impenetrable by human reason. But what 
is there that is not rooted in mystery? Let us recog- 
nise that and it will carry us a long way. Life as a 
whole is mystery — as Charles Dickens would have 
said, is full of sacred and solemn mysteries — and it 
is ours to adjust ourselves rightly towards it. You, 
reader, who read these words, are as much a mystery 
as your Creator. Have you ever thought of that? 
Have you ever reflected upon the amazing fact that 
there is such a being as you in existence at all? Go 
back in thought to the beginning of time and ask 
what intrinsic likelihood there ever was that in so 
many ages you would appear? Beginning of time! 
Even that is unimaginable. What beginning of time 
could there be? Try to picture it and you will see 
the hopelessness of the attempt. Time must be 
boundless at both ends if there be time at all, and 
the moment you begin to talk about boundlessness 
time is clear gone, vanished, swallowed up in eternity. 
Sir Oliver Lodge once gave a capital illustration 
designed to show that the very notion of time is 
part of the limitation at present imposed upon our 
consciousness. A passenger sitting in a railway 
carriage, he said, sees the various objects in the land- 
scape through which he is travelling as a succession; 
trees, fields, ponds, and houses move past his win- 



THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 267 

dow one after the other. But let him get out and 
stand on the nearest hill and he will see them all at 
once; they are no longer a succession, though their 
relation to each other is exactly the same as before ; 
nothing is changed except his own ability to view 
them as a whole instead of as parts of a whole. And 
so, no doubt, it is with all our conceptions of change, 
development, and the rest in regard to the entire 
universe. The limitation is in ourselves. As Ten- 
nyson makes the dying Arthur say in the Idylls of 
the King — 

" O me ! for why is all around us here 
As if some lesser god had made the world, 
But had not force to shape it as he would, 
Till the High God behold it from beyond, 
And enter it, and make it beautiful? 
Or else, as if the world were wholly fair, 
But that these eyes of mine are dense and dim, 
And have not power to see it as it is." 

Here at the beginning of time, let us say, is nothing, 
nothing at all, no God, no man, no mind, no substance 
of any sort. And then, a myriad, myriad aeons later, 
we have a being who can write this article and an- 
other being who can read it, two self-conscious be- 
ings with all sorts of qualities and characteristics of 
their own. Queer, isn't it? And my affirmation is 
that it is every whit as inconceivable on a priori 
grounds — from our purely human standpoint — as 
the being of God. To put the matter whimsically, 
if we did not know the existence of man to be a fact 
we should pronounce it impossible, we should not be 



268 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

able to believe it. One might go further and say 
the same about anything. Why should anything 
whatever exist? The smallest grain of dust is as 
great a mystery in itself as that there should be a 
God to make it. A self-existent clod is as much a 
mystery as a self-existent God. Nay, a far greater 
mystery from a higher standpoint is that such a ruf- 
fian as Von Tirpitz should be at large in a world that 
ought to have learned by this time that nothing is 
only what it seems, that matter is but the instrument 
of spirit, and the soul of man the temple of the living 
God. 

Everybody believes in God. There is no differ- 
ence between us in that respect. There are no 
atheists except in practice. The only difference be- 
tween believers and so-called unbelievers consists in 
what they respectively believe about God. For when 
we speak about God we all of us mean the power that 
produced us and keeps us going, the power manifest 
in the universal order to which we belong. The 
blankest materialist believes in that power, only he 
will refuse to call it God or to credit it with knowing 
or caring anything about us. He will even rhapso- 
dise about it sometimes and expatiate at length on the 
wonders and glories of the world of worlds — they 
all do it more or less. I think it was Tyndall who 
said that the emotions evoked in him by the contem- 
plation of the splendours and sublimities of the 
natural order were akin to those experienced by the 



THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 269 

Christian at his prayers. Very likely, seeing they 
spring from the same root. The real question at 
issue between the man who believes in God and the 
man who says he doesn't is how much we are entitled 
to affirm about the one power in which we all believe 
and in which, in common with the rest of creation, we 
live, and move, and have our being. The material- 
ist will declare that it is blind and deaf and dumb; 
that out there in the trackless void of space is no 
mind higher than our own, on which our own de- 
pends, no guiding intelligence within and behind the 
flux of things in general. He will maintain that hu- 
man self-consciousness is simply a freak of the cosmic 
process, and a tragic freak at that. Our feeble, 
glimmering lamp of intelligence is the only ray that 
lights up the gloom of the universal darkness, a pin- 
point of timorous awareness amid vast and terrific 
eternal forces that will presently blot it out again 
without knowing when it either came or went. And 
I say that this is all one prodigious assumption. No 
man is warranted in claiming to say as much. The 
utmost he can reasonably say is that the whole thing 
is mystery, mystery from beginning to end, as much 
mystery in relation to the humblest creature that 
breathes as to the infinite whence it derives. Reli- 
gion is steeped in mystery, is a reverent recognition 
of mystery, but it is also the testimony that the soul 
can enter into relations with what lies within and 
behind the mystery. It witnesses that the eternal 



270 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

is not blind, and deaf, and dumb; that it is the source 
of all feeling, seeing, and knowing; and that it is as 
possible to enter into communion therewith as for 
one human heart to hold fellowship with another. 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? 

Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." 

It always comes back to that, our individual reaction 
to the stimulus of that mysterious All in One which 
the universe of universes cannot contain and which 
the Christian calls God. It is a fact of experience 
which any man may prove for himself if he has the 
inclination. No one will be convinced of it by argu- 
ment alone any more than he can be convinced of 
the contrary. All that I am doing now in the way 
of argument is to demonstrate that the rationality 
is not all on one side. Reason affirms God in affirm- 
ing the power behind phenomena, but it needs the 
spiritual mind to discover and dwell with Him. 

What is the matter with the world to-day is not 
atheism: that is rubbish. It is indifference. Civil- 
isation has got into the way of attributing more and 
more value to material things as ends in themselves, 
and that is the mischief. Material things are all 
right if viewed in their proper perspective as the 
means whereby spirit finds expression, but to allow 
ourselves to be absorbed and mastered by them to 
the exclusion of all question as to the kind of men 



THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 271 

we are making thereby is fatal to true well-being. 
That is modern civilisation's great blunder and the 
main cause of the present war, especially on the part 
of Germany. Through much tribulation we are be- 
ing brought back to the simple principle that only in 
goodness is there any real hope of permanent happi- 
ness for mankind. We have largely ignored this and 
are suffering accordingly. It would, I suppose, be 
admitted by almost anybody that our astonishing 
material progress in the last fifty years has not been 
accompanied by any commensurate moral progress. 
Labour and Capital were at each other's throats 
before the war, and will be again after it if we do 
not watch out. Blatant, selfish, soulless competition 
in industry has had but one object — that of enrich- 
ing the individual at the expense of his fellows; it is 
going on still in many quarters where the war is 
being taken advantage of to this end, despite the 
glorious heroism of the thousands of men who have 
come right out of it to spill their blood for a spiritual 
ideal. And we shall never get rid of it till religion 
becomes central in the national life once more and 
throughout Christendom, and a purer, simpler faith 
in God replaces our blind utilitarianism. We cannot 
serve God and mammon. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

NOT KNOWING 

" The most terrible thing in life," a friend remarked 
to me once, " is our ignorance; we really know noth- 
ing." One quite understood what he meant, al- 
though the phraseology was somewhat ambiguous. 
For what do we know in the sense of absolute knowl- 
edge? Nothing whatever. All our knowledge is 
relative to something we have to assume but do not 
actually know. It is commonly taken for granted 
that the only realities we can be sure about are 
material ones, the objects cognisable by the five 
senses. Your plain, practical man, as he regards 
himself, is convinced that what he can see, hear, 
touch, taste, and smell is sure and certain, indisput- 
able, and that all beyond is guesswork. Never was 
a greater mistake. The senses tell us nothing about 
reality. We see pictures on the retina of the eye, 
hear sounds, touch surfaces, taste flavours, and smell 
odours; but as to what produces the pictures, sounds, 
flavours, and odours we are totally ignorant, as ig- 
norant as men were in the days of Noah. Science 
deals with phenomena, not with what underlies 
phenomena. The whole material world around us, 
for anything we know to the contrary, may have no 

2J2 



NOT KNOWING 273 

more substantiality than a dream. All we know is 
that there is something which is able to produce cer- 
tain impressions upon our consciousness, and there 
we stop; what that something is in itself we have no 
means of finding out. 

As a matter of fact, our assumption of the reality 
of the external world has nothing to justify it; it is 
only a habit; we are brought up to think that way, 
and we just go on doing it in the ungrained conviction 
that there is no other way of acquiring and inter- 
preting experience. But there is. The Hindu, for 
instance, instinctively does exactly the opposite. 
Whereas we start by taking the world for granted 
and not being sure about the soul, he starts by tak- 
ing the soul for granted and not being sure about 
the world. And his postulate is quite as reasonable 
as ours — more so, in fact, for, when we come to 
look at it, it does seem rather silly to be so certain 
of the objective reality of rocks, and hills, and trees, 
and not at least equally so of the mind that perceives 
them. For what on earth could we possibly know 
of these things except for their reaction on the brain 
of the knower? They may be real or they may not, 
but for us they only exist as ideas within our own 
consciousness. As Amiel said in his famous Journal: 
" Heaven, hell, the world are within us ; man is the 
great abyss." And what an abyss! for we know 
nothing about ourselves either — nothing ultimate, 
that is. The late Father Tyrrell said in his Chris- 



274 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

tianity at the Cross-Roads: "We simply do not 
know what our own spirits are"; and this is true; 
he would be a bold man who would say otherwise. 
Whence came we? whither go we? how stand we to 
the eternal? These are the old, old questions which 
men keep on asking and always will, and to which 
no positive answer can be given by unaided human 
faculty. The cynical Persian sage was about 
right — 

"Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 
About it and about: but evermore 
Came out by the same door wherein I went." 

Mark, I do not say there is no answer to these ancient 
questions; I only say there is none apart from divine 
revelation; we by ourselves cannot discover it. 

But my friend meant more than this when he 
stated that our ignorance is the most terrible thing 
in life. He was thinking of the mystery of the 
world's pain, the sorrow for which there is no earthly 
cure, the sad farewells without certainty of meeting 
again, the wondering and longing that find no com- 
plete satisfaction even in the best that earth can give. 
Tennyson felt it when he sang — 

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
And thinking of the days that are no more." 

Often and often in presence of a scene of wondrous 



NOT KNOWING 275 

beauty, or listening to some piece of music exquisitely 
sweet, or when deeply stirred by some great experi- 
ence or event, I have felt my soul straining at its 
bonds, as it were, and as if the scales were about to 
fall from my eyes and I were just going to remember 
something long forgotten that would make all things 
plain, or realise something that would deliver me 
from the dominion of delusion for evermore. Who 
has not felt the same, more or less, in moments of 
deepest feeling and highest vision? Alas, that the 
shadow should close down again and the world grow 
dark. And do we not all know the feeling of yearn- 
ing sadness that comes over one, say, on gazing from 
a mountain top over some fair valley bathed in sum- 
mer sunshine or clad in autumn glory ? The contem- 
plation of natural beauty can bring tears to the eyes 
— why? Is it not because it makes us realise our 
banishment from some higher and more perfect state 
of being with which our truest affinities are? It is 
the soul's heimweh, our homesickness for a land of 
purer joys and more blessed loves than here. No 
one has ever yet managed to explain what beauty is. 
I think it must be the touch of the supernal, a break- 
ing through into our low estate of that which is above 
all change, and loss, and death, a sacramental reveal- 
ing of the ineffable and all-complete. We glimpse it 
without understanding, but we are conscious of be- 
longing to it somehow, and like exiles we strain our 
weary gaze towards the distant horizon beyond which 



276 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

is the place of our nativity, the spirit's true abode. 

" Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 
When the moon is low and thin, 
Into our heart high yearnings 
Come welling and surging in — 
Come from the mystic ocean, 
Whose rim no foot hath trod — 
Some of us call it Longing, 
And others call it God." 

Professor Carruth of Stanford University, Cali- 
fornia, the author of the well-known poem which 
contains this verse, has just written to me expressing 
the sympathy and concern of our cousins across the 
water at the tribulation through which we are pass- 
ing in Europe. " What can it all mean? : ' he says. 
I wish I could tell him; we don't know. Our best 
beloved are passing from us through the red mist of 
war, and our knowledge cannot follow them fur- 
ther, our hands cannot serve them more. 

Life's farewells derive most of their poignancy 
from this fact: we do not actually know what has be- 
come of our dead. We do not actually know, when 
we definitely part from any one, what will have hap- 
pened before we see him again, if we ever do see him 
again. A mother once told me that to her dying day 
she will never forget the clang of the garden gates 
as her son walked down the path to go and push his 
fortune in New Zealand. The agony of that mo- 
ment! The pathos of it! He was almost all she 
had in the world, and for all she knew that good-bye 
was permanent so far as this life is concerned. If 



NOT KNOWING 277 

she had known beyond all doubt, as she knows now, 
that the boy would come safely home again into her 
arms, the sound of the closing gate as he went from 
her would not have rung like a knell upon her heart. 
He is at the front now, and I warrant she is recalling 
what she felt the last time he left her side to face the 
perils of the great unknown. For what if he does 
not come back this time ? She is a devout believer in 
God and heaven, but perhaps, like thousands more, 
she finds belief to be one thing and realisation an- 
other. If we could only realise that as surely as the 
sun is shining somewhere at this moment, so surely 
are those we call dead living, active, conscious, lov- 
ing as before, it would pluck the sting out of bereave- 
ment; we should not grieve or be desolate any more, 
much as we should long for a sight of the well-re- 
membered face again and the sound of the voice that 
once made music in our ears. We should miss our 
beloved sorely but would not feel them so far away. 
Can it be done ? I believe it can, and that is why 
I write. It all depends on how closely we ourselves 
live to the imperishable and divine — just that and 
nothing more. We have got to have a soul above 
sordid values and firmly refuse to submit to the 
claim that things are only what they seem. Live 
bravely and consistently for the spiritual, and the 
material will lose its power to blind your vision. It 
is not only a question of living nobly; many people 
are trying to do that who do not get much consola- 



278 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

tion out of it. It is a question of living by what the 
saints call faith. And do you know what that is? 
It is not at all what many people make it out to be, 
shutting your eyes and jumping, as it were, blindly 
believing certain things which are from the nature of 
the case unprovable. I will tell you what it is: it is 
spiritual instinct. That does not sound much, but 
wait a moment. That great French thinker, Henri 
Bergson, has been telling us for a long time that 
instinct and reason are not, as has been commonly 
assumed, successive products of the same evolutionary 
force, reason being the later and higher ; they are two 
separate branches from the same trunk, and of the 
two instinct is far more unerring than reason as far 
as it goes. Reason gropes and fumbles, and is a 
clumsy instrument at the best for its purpose, which 
is to enable us to find our way about in this three- 
dimensional material world of ours; it is not well to 
rely on it too much when it becomes a question of 
dealing with the deepest things. Instinct, on the 
other hand, the instinct of a mother bird to build her 
nest and rear her young, is of marvellous precision; 
it always goes straight to the mark. It can and does 
make mistakes sometimes, as when the mildness of 
January and February this year misled the birds into 
thinking spring had come when it had not; but on the 
whole it is far more to be trusted than intellect in 
getting at the roots of life, so to speak. I would 
rather put the case this way: All our reasoning 



NOT KNOWING 279 

really starts from intuition; and our higher instincts 
or intuitions, call them which you will, are to be re- 
lied upon, especially as we see the beautiful fruits 
of character they can produce when obeyed to the 
full. The fact that they transcend reason does not 
mean that they contradict it. If instinct, or what 
I thought to be instinct, told me the earth was flat 
I should pay no heed to it, for reason tells me dif- 
ferent. But when reason can neither prove nor dis- 
prove those sublime findings of the soul on which 
all that is good and great in human experience is 
based, I bid it take its proper place and acquiesce 
where it cannot deny. 

It is good not to know now many things that one 
day we shall know ; and that is where faith comes in. 
If you absolutely knew beyond all cavil that it would 
pay you to tell the truth when you were tempted to 
lie, or that you would come home safely and be held 
in high honour for having volunteered for the war, 
there would be nothing noble either in telling the 
truth or pretending to risk your life in your country's 
cause. All that is fine and exalted in human char- 
acter and conduct is the fruit of this not knowing for 
certain — that is, it is born of faith. To know for 
certain what lies beyond death would not necessarily 
make any one a better man; what does make him a 
better man is the way in which he rises to the occa- 
sion when death has to be faced or sorrow to be 
borne. I once asked from the pulpit how we should 



280 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

individually behave, the many hundreds of us gath- 
ered there, if we knew positively that we had only 
twenty-four hours to live. The man who drove me 
home that night is, or was, the proprietor of a large 
motor-car establishment, but like millions of his 
countrymen he is now at the front, driving motor 
wagons for the army. He had evidently been im- 
pressed by my question, and as we went along he 
discussed it. Finally he said, with conviction: 
" Well, supposing I was as able to attend to business 
as I am just now, I should go down to the garage as 
usual." I believe he would, and he was right. For 
what more do we know about the future than that; 
and what more do we need to know? If we could 
see the glory of the invisible world as it is round 
about us at this moment, there would be no atheists ; 
but perhaps there would be no saints either. For 
saints are made, as all high worth is made, by spir- 
itual ventures, by battle, effort, struggle, sacrifice; 
and the essence of these things is our ignorance of 
the issue. We have to scale the heights without see- 
ing the summits, believing we shall get there in the 
end ; and it is with heaven to see that we do. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 

In the previous chapter I have tried to show that 
our ignorance of the great issue of life is one con- 
dition of the development of the finest fruits of char- 
acter. It is the mystery that surrounds us and which 
veils the future that makes great actions great. If 
we could know with mathematical certainty exactly 
why we have to suffer this or that, or exactly what 
will be the outcome of the deeds we do, there could 
be no such thing as nobleness in conduct. It is just 
because we don't know, in the sense of complete 
demonstration, but have to act without knowing — 
that is, by what alone is worthy to be called faith — 
that we can rise to sublime heights of moral and 
spiritual achievement. We are seeing that abun- 
dantly in the sacrifices of the present world war. 
Conversely, one might have added, it is because of 
our comparative ignorance that we sorrow as we do. 
We cannot escape it, being limited as we are. But 
if we knew, absolutely knew without a shadow of 
doubt, precisely what is going to happen to us all 
" when this passing world is done " ; or, to put it bet- 
ter, if we knew things as a whole precisely as they 
are at this moment in seen and unseen combined, 

281 



282 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

there would not be much left to trouble about; weep- 
ing eyes would soon be dried, weary hearts would 
cease to ache. 

Another aspect of this theme presents itself to 
my mind : our ignorance of each other. If we really 
knew each other, what a difference it would make to 
life! I am not suggesting it would be altogether 
good if we did. Here, too, we have to earn our wis- 
dom, and it is well that we should; it is part of our 
discipline that we should come to fuller knowledge 
through patience, forbearance, charity, mutual serv- 
ice ; we cannot jump into perfect fellowship, perfect 
all-round understanding; it has to be sought for, 
gained, and won as part of the world process by 
which we are being educated for the kingdom of 
heaven. 

But let us try to envisage the situation for a mo- 
ment, and then consider what we ought to do with 
reference to it. Here are a couple of instances of 
what I mean. A father writes to me stating that it 
is months since he heard from his son at the front, 
and that he does not know for certain whether the 
boy is dead or alive except that he has not yet seen 
his name in the casualty lists, which he scans care- 
fully every day. And he adds this pathetic fact: 
Every day he goes down to Victoria Station and 
stands for some hours wistfully watching the trains 
come in with their freights of wounded and of men 
home on leave, in the vain hope that his son may be 



OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 283 

among them, and always he has to go back to his 
lonely lodging sad and disappointed. For there is 
something of a tragedy behind this experience. The 
family is divided. Husband and wife separated 
years ago, and the children have been brought up 
as was inevitable under the circumstances. Perhaps 
the father is a little trying — who knows ? perhaps 
he is one of those unfortunate people who cannot ex- 
press themselves well even to their hearts' best be- 
loved; perhaps his children have never suspected the 
depth and wealth of affection of which he is capable. 
But my point is that if this soldier son only knew, 
what very likely he does not even guess, what pain his 
father suffers on his account, and how he yearns to 
hear from him, how, in fact, he thinks of little else, 
the desired letter would soon be forthcoming. 
What a surprise he would probably get if he knew 
how his father thinks and feels, if he could only read 
this outpouring of a long-pent-up experience ! And 
he is not the only one who would get a similar sur- 
prise if the secrets of all hearts could be revealed. 

The second instance is more personal to myself 
but is illustrative of the general disability above 
described. My position at the City Temple brought 
me into contact with all kinds of people from all over 
the world. A chance remark in a sermon which 
found its way into print would sometimes bring me a 
visit from a person who had to travel hundreds of 
miles in order to make it. I say a chance remark, 



284 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

but are there any such? God does not always take 
His human instruments into His confidence when He 
utters a message by them to other souls. Again and 
again I have found that an observation to which 
one attributed no importance has been taken by a 
hearer or a reader as a direct word for their particu- 
lar problem. And so, no doubt, it was, but it was 
not the preacher's word, it proceeded from a higher 
source and was intended for that mind in which it 
found lodgment. One such case was as follows. A 
young fellow asked for an appointment and came to 
see me. I did not much care for the look of him 
when we met. Long experience of the stories of 
cadgers had made me suspicious of individuals who 
began by telling one that they had reformed after a 
downfall and only wanted a little money to make a 
new start. This chap did not get on with his tale 
very well, and did not seem to me to have a proper 
appreciation of his position. He had made free 
with his employer's money to pay gambling debts and 
had suffered a term of imprisonment for it — an old 
story and with no redeeming features about it. He 
was not a weak-looking man either, and somehow 
gave one the impression of being callous. So I 
hardened up, kept silent, withheld sympathy, and 
listened coldly while the rambling narrative went on. 
Suddenly, without warning, the lad stopped, his lip 
quivered, he looked at me helplessly for a moment, 
and then broke down. He did not try to resume 



OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 285 

speaking, which was wise as it happened; he simply 
held out a letter to me, and I took it and read it. 
It was a wonderful letter, thumbed and dirty from 
being carried in the ex-convict's pocket, and read and 
re-read. It was written by the girl who loved him, 
written before he came out of prison, to tell him that 
she still believed in him and would share his lot 
through thick and thin. She had been as good as her 
word, waiting for him at the prison gate for hours in 
the darkness and cold of a winter's morning on the 
day of his discharge, and had been his good angel 
ever since, keeping him from utter ruin and despair, 
and nerving him to fight the almost hopeless fight 
back into respectability and a footing in life. How 
wrong I was ! How little I knew the man before 
me ! How I had misjudged ! What has become 
of him since I do not know, but I would give a good 
deal to know. I saw him with different eyes in an 
instant, and all that in his demeanour previously told 
against him now told in his favour. 

Yes, if we only knew ! We are so desperately 
afraid of being taken in, and not without good rea- 
son. But we are far too ready with our contempt; 
few merit it, and none are entitled to show it. I won- 
der why it is that harsh judgment is so much more 
readily indulged in than kind. In most any society 
you will hear people's motive canvassed cruelly, often 
mercilessly, and the worst possible construction 
placed upon them. And even at the best we are 



286 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

curiously dumb in our relations with each other; we 
do not positively know what any one else is feeling 
or thinking. We cannot tell what the inside " feel n 
of any common experience is to those who share it 
with us. " The heart knoweth its own bitterness, 
and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy." 

"We are spirits clad in veils; 
Man by man was never seen; 
All our deep communing fails 
To remove the shadowy screen. 
Heart to heart was never known! 
Mind with mind did never meet! 
We are columns left alone, 
Of a Temple once complete." 

We are all more or less lonely; it cannot be helped; 
it is in the nature of things at our present stage of 
existence; individually we are islands in a sea of 
mystery, and as far as I know there is only one boat 
which can sail that sea, and that is love. Mere 
propinquity does little or nothing to reveal us to each 
other. We may be the veriest strangers and yet be 
in daily association. Often the very last person to 
whom you can disclose yourself is your nearest rel- 
ative. It might utterly astonish parents sometimes 
if they could see their children in other company. 
And is it not easily possible to go through life with- 
out having your real self drawn out by congenial 
companionship? Millions of people, especially 
women, live habitually in a state of self-repression; 
and the average Englishman is far more frightened 
of letting any one peep inside his soul than he is of 



OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 287 

facing German guns. It is a rare thing, rare indeed, 
that some great emotional crisis brings to the sur- 
face that elusive something which is oneself, as dis- 
tinct from every other being that has ever lived. As 
Lord Houghton says — 

"We live together years and years, 

And leave unsounded still 
Each other's springs of hopes and fears, 

Each other's depths of will : — 
We live together day by day, 

And some chance look or tone 
Lights up with instantaneous ray 

An inner world unknown!" 

Unknown even to ourselves probably. Every island 
in this sea of mystery is but the summit of a mountain 
which goes down for miles beneath the waters ere 
it mingles its being with all the rest. We shall never 
know ourselves as we are till the day comes when we 
know as we are known. Faber, the great Roman 
Catholic hymn writer, said no more than the truth in 
the striking statement on this subject which he has 
left on record: " Most frequently men look new in 
dying. Death discloses whole regions of unexplored 
character. Life has not by any means drawn us out 
as it might have done. We all go to our graves un- 
known, worlds of unsuspected greatness. In truth, 
life is but a momentary manifestation of us. The 
longest life is too narrow for our breadth. We are 
capable of a thousand positions, but life has only 
placed us in two or three. " 

It is an old proverb that love is blind; it would be 



288 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

truer to say that it is love only that can see. We 
find each other with the heart and not otherwise. 
I wish the word love were not so slippery and capable 
of so many meanings in the English tongue. I am 
guilty of no sentimentality in using it now, for I am 
thinking less of particularistic affection than of the 
good will which every human being may entertain 
towards every other, and must, or he will never know 
himself, let alone anybody else. I listened yesterday 
to an address by a great churchman, one of the ablest 
it has ever been my privilege to hear. At the close 
the speaker said that no man could love to order. 
I questioned the observation then, and do so still 
more now. We cannot love to order in the sense 
of experiencing the same passion of attachment to 
people indiscriminately that we feel for two or three; 
but we can love to order, and ought to do so, in the 
sense that we can be in charity with all men, can 
refuse to withhold sympathy even from the erring 
and the weak, or to be suspicious and censorious in 
our dealings with mankind at large. In so doing we 
should only be rendering obedience to the greatest 
teacher the world has ever had when He said: " A 
new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one 
another." There is a French proverb, " To know 
all is to forgive all." And I should think there is 
none truer. If we could only see people as they 
really are we might often pity but we should never 
scorn. But as we cannot at present see people as 



OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 289 

they really are, however hard they may try to make 
us, the best we can do is to learn to discover with the 
heart what is hidden from the head. That other 
French proverb, " I cannot understand, I love," con- 
tains a wealth of wisdom, and incidentally the solu- 
tion of all humanity's problems. Shall we get back 
to it after the war? 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE AGES OF FAITH AND THE AGES OF REASON: 
NEW-OLD AND OLD-NEW 

An acquaintance asks me to state more clearly what 
I meant in saying some time ago that the world in 
which Cicero lived was much more like ours than that 
of St. Francis, the little poor man of Assisi, twelve 
hundred years later; and that although the spirit 
of the twentieth century hitherto had been with Cic- 
ero, I earnestly hoped that as a result of the war 
the rest of it might be with Francis. I willingly com- 
ply with the suggestion, for the contrast to which it 
makes reference is both striking and instructive. 
What I meant was that the kind of mentality which 
was dominant in the civilisation of Cicero's age was 
one with which we should feel at home. The gen- 
eral outlook on life was very similar to ours; we 
should without much difficulty understand men like 
Cicero and his contemporaries, their ways were so 
like our own. On the other hand, people like Fran- 
cis would puzzle us completely; we should not be 
able to get near them at all, so to speak; their as- 
sumptions, ideals, beliefs, ways of expressing them- 
selves, were all widely different from ours. We 
should think them mad, or they would think us mad ; 

290 



AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 291 

and the question is, which of us would be right, 
if either? I hold and maintain that, with all its 
drawbacks, it would be better to assimilate our- 
selves to the mental attitude of men like Francis 
than that of men like Cicero. We have had too 
much of the one and not enough of the other. 
I wish to see our ordinary mentality changed, not 
in the direction of being either more or less clever 
than our forbears, but of being simpler, more child- 
like, more open to influences from the unseen and 
readier to take them for granted, less governed by 
purely secular desires and aims. That is all: now, 
to illustrate. 

Two thousand years ago southern Europe was the 
seat of a civilisation which in certain ways has never 
been surpassed. The world has made no real ad- 
vance in the cult of the beautiful since then either in 
art or letters. The Acropolis at Athens was as fine 
in its way as anything we are building now, finer 
probably. We have never produced more glorious 
sculptures than those of Pheidias or Praxiteles; one 
does not need to be an expert to appreciate that. 
None of our men of letters in modern times have 
created a greater literature than that of Homer, 
Plato, Virgil, Horace, and perhaps Cicero himself. 
Any reader of this page who cares to get Dr. Samuel 
Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius 
out of a library and read it will find that the society 
of that day was startingly like ours in many ways. 



292 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

It had its millionaires, like Mr. Carnegie, who were 
expected to make huge public benefactions, endowing 
institutions and the like; it had its proletariat, trade 
unions, and strikes. Of course it had its smart set 
and week-enders, with their town houses, country 
houses and seaside villas, pet dogs, yachts and motor 
cars — the word slipped out, I ought to have said 
chariots. There were no football matches, but 
crowds of about the same size, vast assemblages, 
used to gather to watch men fight in the gladiatorial 
contests. There were public baths and gentlemen's 
clubs, and I know not what else. There was even 
a sort of substitute for a daily paper with all the news 
and gossip in it. Two years ago this month I was 
in Italy, and went to look at two interesting spots — 
Pompeii and Ostia. Both are still in process of ex- 
cavation, having been buried under debris for ages, 
the former by a sudden disaster, and the latter by 
the lapse of time, its inhabitants having deserted it 
through loss of the trade by which they made their 
living. Pompeii was a place of retirement for the 
rich, a centre of luxury; Ostia was a prosperous sea- 
port with a hard-working population. It felt very 
queer to look at those two cities as their walls and 
streets had been laid bare by the pickaxe and shovel. 
They were very different from each other. It struck 
me as I gazed upon the silent tokens of Pompeii's 
unblushing sensuality and riotous pleasure-seeking 
that it pretty well deserved its fate ; it was about time 



AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 293 

it should be blotted out. It shared the lot of Sodom 
and Gomorrah in more ways than one. And yet, 
I thought, how like our own palaces, theatres and 
music-halls are the elaborate buildings of this city of 
the dead. The very drainage system anticipated our 
modern sanitation (I don't think they troubled much 
about drains in the days of St. Francis), and of all 
things in the world they actually had central heating ! 
At Ostia one saw on the quays the offices formerly 
occupied by the trade union officials, and where they 
used to meet the employers' representatives when the 
discussions took place about the standard rate of 
wages or the expulsion of blacklegs. In no sense 
can we be said to have invented anything new in the 
modern organisation of labour as compared with that 
of these dockers and merchants' clerks of old. 
They had a very vigorous municipal life, too, and 
statues and inscriptions setting forth the virtues of 
deceased mayors and aldermen (of course they did 
not call them that, but it came to the same thing), 
and there were hints that the woman question was 
a sore point then as now; suffragettes of sorts had 
been at work. And then the elections, the parties, 
the quarrels between public men, the caucuses, the 
candidatures! Gentlemen who thought they would 
do well on the Town Council issued their election ad- 
dresses and asked for the support of the ratepayers 
in our good, enlightened British style. There they 
all were, just as if it were yesterday. One felt that 



294 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

if Cicero had come up the street one might have 
asked him the nearest way to the Underground. But 
then one remembered that Cicero would probably 
not have been walking up a street in Ostia ; it would 
be like looking for the editor of the Spectator 
amongst the costers' barrows in Whitechapel. Cic- 
ero belonged to the intellectuals and took his exercise 
in the Forum in a thoroughly decorous manner, no 
doubt. Did he not once say that no shopkeeper 
could be a gentleman? And how eloquently he 
wrote about the dignified joys of old age and about 
death as " coming into harbour," and what a poor 
show he made when death actually overtook him in 
his own garden in the person of the imperial execu- 
tioner! For all his polite moralising, Cicero's in- 
terests were wholly of this world, and he had the 
vaguest ideas of the beyond. But one would not 
have been surprised to meet the Right Hon. Will 
Crooks in Ostia at the beginning of the Christian 
era ; it would just be his setting — the working man 
part of it, anyhow, the plutocratic part would be the 
haunt of the makers of huge war profits. 

Now let us jump a thousand years or more nearer 
to our own time. What a change ! Here is a world 
of unfamiliar features indeed, though it is that of 
our own ancestors and partly occupied our own soil. 
Look at the Gothic cathedrals newly reared with 
their pinnacles soaring to heaven, then as now the 
greatest triumph of the builder's art, the last word 



AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 295 

in architecture, sacred poems frozen into stone, as 
they have been fitly called. We see them now after 
the wear of ages, but what must they have been 
originally? Surely the people who could plan and 
erect such structures as these to the glory of God 
must have possessed something worth our while to 
recover. The life of the community centred around 
the altar. The nave of the parish church was the 
place where the affairs of the parish were transacted, 
the social meeting-place — hence, perhaps, the rea- 
son for the rood screen to shut off the inner sanctuary 
from the place of conversation and discussion. 
Canon Jessopp tells us that probably the villagers 
themselves helped to build the church with their own 
hands; fancy them doing it now! Mr. Chesterton 
has said somewhere that a cathedral is of more im- 
portance to national well-being than a factory. Our 
forefathers certainly thought so, but do we? Noth- 
ing could better typify the change that has passed 
over the world since the days when the Gothic cathe- 
dral was new than the fact that the factory has come 
to usurp its place. It speaks of utilitarianism in ev- 
ery line, the general uglification and sordidification 
of life, if I may be permitted to coin a word — slums, 
sweated industries, overcrowding, and all the rest 
with which we are only too familiar. I do not want 
to idealise the past; I think I know too much of his- 
tory for that. The age of St. Francis was a rude, 
violent, ignorant age in many ways, but it had the 



a 9 6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

sense of the eternal, that is what I am driving at. If 
a people's buildings are the expression of its soul, 
then the soul of the thirteenth century was nearer 
God than ours. The unseen world was every whit 
as real to the men and women of that period as the 
seen is to us, and occupied the foreground of their 
thoughts; we have turned matters just the other way 
round. What we need to get back is not their super- 
stitions but their childlike faith. Until the war 
broke out I should have said that we were more hu- 
mane than they, had outgrown their cruelties and 
brutalities, but Zeppelin raids, Belgian and Serbian 
atrocities, Armenian massacres and the like have 
taught us better. We cannot boast of any superior- 
ity now over the ancients in these respects except to 
say that we are more efficient in our butcheries, more 
expert in the invention of infernal machines for de- 
stroying human life, and less scrupulous in employing 
them. There was such a thing as the Truce of God 
in the Middle Ages; where is it now? 

How should we ever understand a man like St. 
Louis (King Louis IX of France), who went to war 
over the very same ground as our troops are now oc- 
cupying in the near East, but with a different motive? 
He went to wrest the tomb of Christ from the fol- 
lowers of Mahomet; Germany makes common cause 
with them against the rest of Christendom. Join- 
ville tells an amusing story (amusing from our point 
of view, not his) about the voyage of the king and 



AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 297 

his crusading army through the Mediterranean to 
Egypt, and how they were caught in storm after 
storm and could make no headway. The sailors 
saw that a mountain on the north coast of Africa 
kept pace with them hour after hour, and at last they 
cried out in terror that the phenomenon was due to 
enchantment by evil spirits. The only thing to be 
done was to carry the Blessed Sacrament in solemn 
procession round the deck with the priest chanting 
a Litany the while; so poor Joinville, who was ter- 
ribly seasick, was routed out of his hard bed, and 
half led, half carried in that procession behind his 
king with the object of getting rid of the invisible 
makers of storms who were hindering their progress 
so grievously. We can picture the comic spectacle 
— the cockleshell of a ship pitching and rolling, the 
priests in their vestments staggering along with their 
sacred burden, feebly twittering their lay, the pious 
king following, and behind him a stumbling, jum- 
bling company of mail-clad knights and their re- 
tainers, green and white with mat de mer but having 
to keep their place in the ranks somehow. There 
would be terrible catastrophies at intervals, we may 
be very sure ! And no one could be surprised to 
learn that at the third time round the menacing 
mountain had disappeared! Of course it would; 
anything would that was assailed by such intrepid 
devotion as that. But before we laugh let us be 
quite sure that we really know more of the spiritual 



298 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

universe than those simple-minded adventurers did. 
Read the Little Flowers of St. Francis, and then 
ask if picture theatres and Council schools — - or the 
most up-to-date German scientific education, with its 
utter destruction of the spirit of reverence in pres- 
ence of the holy mysteries everywhere surrounding 
us — have done so very much for our betterment, 
after all. Take the quaint account of the little boy 
" very pure and innocent " who slept near St. Francis 
and tied the cord round his waist to that of the saint 
so as to know when the latter got up to pray in the 
night. " And coming close up to the place where 
Saint Francis was praying, he began to hear much 
discourse; and drawing nigher for to see and learn 
what it was he heard, he beheld a marvellous light 
that shone round about Saint Francis, and therein 
he saw Christ and the Virgin Mary and Saint John 
the Baptist and the Evangelist, and a great multi- 
tude of angels, speaking with Saint Francis." We 
are so clever nowadays that we know that boy was a 
liar and never saw anything of the sort, and that all 
the other wonderful tales about St. Francis and his 
doings are false likewise; that Brother John's ecstasy 
at Communion, when " straightway the form of the 
bread vanished, and in the Host appeared Jesu 
Christ the Blessed One, incarnate and glorified " was 
pure delusion; that the fierce wolf of Agobio was 
never converted, and that the fishes and the birds 
never listened to sermons, however eloquent. But 



AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 299 

at the risk of offending all my readers, and losing any 
respect they ever had for me, I confess that I am 
sceptical of the scepticism, and that in any event I 
wish we had the state of mind back again that could 
so believe, seeing God in everything, and with their 
belief living lives of simple, humble, self-crucifying 
goodness and love. 

Lucretius was a contemporary of Cicero, and an 
equally clever man, an uncompromising atheist and 
materialist, like nearly all the intellectuals of his day. 
There was plenty of churchgoing, by the way — if 
that be the right name for it — and the clever people 
were greatly amused thereby. Fashionable ladies 
thronged the temple of Isis, for instance, and made 
valuable offerings at the shrine to obtain the favour 
of the goddess for their lovers. Spiritualism and 
fortune-telling had their votaries, and I daresay 
Cicero himself had his palm read at a drawing-room 
meeting now and then. I am quite sure Lucretius 
would not. He hated supernaturalism in all its 
forms. The following is from Mr. Mallock's trans- 
lation of his great poem On the Nature of Things — 

"O peoples miserable! O fools and blind! 
What night you east o'er all the days of man, 
And in that night before you and behind 
What perils prowl ! But you nor will nor can 
See that the treasure of a tranquil mind 
Is all that nature pleads for, for this span, 
So that between our birth and grave we gain 
Some quiet pleasures, and a pause from pain." 

Really, it is very like what Haeckel is saying to-day, 



300 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 

only that one has never known the great German 
savant to break into poetry. Poor Lucretius ! He 
committed suicide fifty years before Christ was born. 
Is it clear now why I earnestly wish that in the years 
following the war we might shake off the spell of this 
soul-killing secularity of temper and get back to the 
simplicity and trustfulness of the wonder-working 
child-man, who always described himself as " Christ's 
poor little one, Francis " ? 



THE END 



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